What render management software do people like, from both a cost and a user experience point of view?
How do you like the way they manage jobs, and how do you find them to administrate, as well as from a user's point of view?
Hugh Macdonald
[ Editor ]
I'm going to answer my own question with my own thoughts on this (although I do want to hear what other people think)
I've had experience with Alfred, Rush, DrQueue and Muster (oh, and, very briefly, my own home-rolled one)
Alfred
From a user's point of view, it gives a lot of good information, and as a developer, it gives by far the most flexibility when creating jobs. I've not used any other system that allows the same level of dependency in one job. Code that I've written to submit jobs to the farm has to have features disabled when it's submitting to anything other than Alfred.
From an administrator's point of view, though, it's somewhat of a pain. I've only administrated it on a very small level, but I've heard horror stories from people who've run it at large companies.
The main downside to me is the cost of Alfred. You're paying per user (rather than per render node), which is unusual, but, I believe (don't quote me on this) that you're looking at about $1000 per user. Compared to the others below, this is an order of magnitude larger. If you can afford it, though, I'd still go this route.
Rush
I developed a severe dislike to Rush right from the start. Maybe because I moved onto it straight after being somewhere else using Alfred, but the way it deals with your jobs is a pain. And if you're creating jobs automatically, the submission scripts that you have to create are a real pain. I didn't use it long enough to get more acquainted, as the company that I was using it at switched over to Alfred after not very long using Rush.
I never had any experience managing it, though, so I can't say anything on that front, and cost-wise, I believe it's about $160 per render node.
DrQueue
It's free, which is a good start, but crashy as hell, and I gave up on it after not very long. It's also, as an open-source piece of software, a pain to get compiled and installed (I was doing this under OSX). I gave up and actually paid money for something. Not a huge amount of experience.
Muster
We're actually using Muster at the moment here. After trying out DrQueue, and not getting anywhere, we looked at a few of the options out there, and ended up going with Muster, as it was both available on OSX, and was the cheapest of the not-free ones.
From a user's point of view, it's very similar to most of the other things out there. Jobs work independently (as a series of tasks), and jobs can depend on other jobs, but there certainly isn't the extensive dependencies system that makes Alfred what it is.
As far as admining it goes, it does have a tendency to crash (on OSX, this is - I've not tried it on Windows or Linux) quite a bit - nothing that can't be sorted with a script that re-launches finished processes, but it generally works, and has served us well (up to about 10 artists at the most so far) for the past year or so.
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