The thought process for me and mine goes thusly:

We don't typically make sweeping changes to our pool of render resources very often so the hardware characteristics are effectively constant.

The choice to purchase a given quantity of licenses of a given piece of software is made with budget considerations more than for performance ones. So quantity of licenses is effectively constant.

Software vendors have always and will always make the licensing terms suit their needs and not ours so per-core/per-host/per-site/node-locking options are out of our control as well.

The only variables left are how one sub-divides the pool of hardware resources and then how a software maps to a unit of those resources.

So I don't make a farm-wide strategy, instead I make a per-software tool strategy. Quantify the performance of each piece of software on each known hardware profile using each plausible software configurations. Let that inform the making of an optimised launch strategy for each tool to then be asserted in the render job launching process.

By: Paul Nendick [ Editor ]