Renderfarm scenario, windows, virtualisation, you can help the kitty to stop crying!

[Robert Freitag]

Hello everyone! How nice of you to read this! 

I'm a visual effects artist and I was able to build quite a cool render farm scenario for my company. Since we need to rely mostly on Windows 

because of the 3D software we use (3Ds Max and Vray) I'm ending up with quite high operating costs JUST for Windows.

It's actually ridiculously much, if you check out this Calculation you can see why (metaphorically speaking) the kitty is crying.

Since I don't need 99.9% of the features that Windows Server provides, a simple windows 7 or 10 would be more than sufficient. 

Unfortunately, GCE does not support Windows 7 or 10. So my first question is: Will it at some point in the future support a "regular" Windows?

The next thing I tried was running a Debian instance with Virtualbox in order to virtualise a "regular" Windows environment (bulk license is about 18$ a piece) 

but I found out that VT-X is not supported by GCE entirely and now I'm stuck with high pricing for Windows server.

So here are my questions in order again:

1.) Will GCE in the future support "regular" Windows images on Instances

2.) Will GCE in the future support VT-X? I found an old thread about it but are there any news about it?

If you have any completely different approach on how to make this work (except switching 3D Software of course) I'm open to all kinds of suggestions!

Thanks!

-Robert Freitag

www.fridayvfx.com

[Kamran (Google Cloud Support)]

Hey Robert,

I'm not a visual effects or rendering expert but I think your approach may not be highly scalable or cost efficient. That being said, Google Cloud Platform have a solution called Zync Render that designed allowing artists to use the tools and renderers they already know with integrated licensing, billing, and full visibility into the rendering pipeline. It scales to more than 30,000 cores on-demand, paying per-minute only for what you render on your visual effects and graphics rendering projects. Using it you can avoid production bottlenecks during peak times by launching massive rendering jobs in parallel on Google’s infrastructure.

Visit this link for more information about Zync Render. There is also a pricing calculator at this link which you can use to estimate the cost.

I hope this helps. If you have further questions please let me know.

Regards,

[Robert Freitag]

Hey Kamran, 

thanks for your answer. Unfortunately, Zync is not an option for me/us because I need the ability to be able to have a "workstation" online in the cloud that generates gigabytes (sometimes hundreds of gigabytes) of cache 

files for examples fluid simulations, fire, smoke, particles etc. Zync render allows you to upload these via a client software but since the file sizes are huge, it's not an option to upload this much.

In the meanwhile, I might have found a solution by exporting the scenes to a stand-alone format of the renderer (wich has a proper Linux stand alone client). In that case I only would need one 

windows instance for exporting in the cloud. But since this way comes with a lot of restrictions regarding 3rd party plugins, I'd still like to do it the "normal" way, running 3ds max instances on windows clients.

Is google planning to support a more cost efficient windows version then the Data Center stuff which is charged on a "per core" basis?

Thanks,

-Robert

[Kamran (Google Cloud Support)]

Hey Robert,

I'd like to mention that a feature request is already opened for Windows 10 image in GCE that has been forwarded to the engineering team. However, I cannot guarantee its implementation or provide you with an ETA, but rest assured that Google strives to bring in more features into its products and that your feedback helps us do just that.

Thank you,

[Paul Nash]

Hi Robert, in short:

We understand your scenario very well, and wish we could offer a solution here.

1) Unfortunately Microsoft does not currently provide a way for Google to effectively offer Windows desktop client licenses for use in public cloud. Your exact request, for this exact reason (rendering farms) is one that we receive from several customers, but we cannot offer a solution. Microsoft client licenses typically are tied to a physical machine for the entire life of the machine and typically can't be transferred easily between multiple users, and these restrictions make public cloud use impractical currently.

2) VT-x support is a feature request we are considering in the future, but we would advise that you'll be responsible for determining whether or not the method you propose is allowed under Microsoft's licensing terms regardless.

Sorry we don't currently have better news,

-Paul

--
© 2016 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
 
Email preferences: You received this email because you signed up for the Google Compute Engine Discussion Google Group (gce-discussion@googlegroups.com) to participate in discussions with other members of the Google Compute Engine community and the Google Compute Engine Team.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "gce-discussion" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to gce-discussion+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to gce-discussion@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gce-discussion/c896920d-f20e-45d5-b3f5-995b7291fd2c%40googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Paul R. Nash |

Product Manager, Compute Engine |

paul...@google.com |

206-876-1620