Instead of installing an application on C:\program files ... it would be desirable to install on a server and run from it. If the environment for the application is setup correctly plugins, user settings licenses etc. should work properly.
The benefit is that you only have to maintain one environment. But some apps that may require local access to registries and could fail. Also the performance could be worse.
I'd like to hear your experiences and recommendations.
Add comment viewed 258 times Latest activity 7 months ago
haggi
We had a lot of problems with network installations on windows. Especially if you often update plugins or even a update of maya or other, and you are running a renderfarm, then a lot of files can be locked because they are in use.
So we switched to a mixed method. We copy everything locally with a bat file wich looks if there are changes and do only a copy if they are newer files on the server. With a lot of applications this procedure works really fine. And with bat files you can completly set your environment and use several versions of software without interaction.
One problem is that e.g. maya installs a lot of libraries into windows/winsxs directory. So this is the reason why you cannot run maya simply from a server. Once you know the necessary files, you can simply copy them as well and everything should work.
Another issue can be a low performance with a lot of small files, e.g. in maya we had some little performance problems with loading mel scripts from the server. But it depends on your sever configuration.
So I recommend to use such a dual solution. Copy it locally and it will work even if your server is down and you will not lock files.
Thanks for confirming my doubts. There is nothing left but to test which apps do work and which don’t. Maya seems to be one of the beasts that doen’t like being shared that much.
michalf
[ Editor ]
We have maya setup this way. While it's super easy to configure in a central place, it does not work without problems. For windows workstations, I had to install maya locally. After installation, you can run server copy of maya and it works most times. We had some minor issues (with muscles IIRC), but this could be due to our messed network setup. We're building new network, so I'll be able to verify this soon. Linux render nodes (which doesn't run GUI) seems to work perfectly.
Nuke and 3delight also run from server copy. I heard one could experience 3delight4maya slow shader translation in case of network install, but I never experienced it. Other minor apps are djv and vDub.
I'd like to know how to install python from central location, especially for windows. Has anyone experience with this ?
EDIT: Recently we tried running more maya instances from network server, and we experienced problems. This was linux64-maya placed on a low performance network server (CentOS/Samba). Trying to run more sessions at the same time put server harddisk under heavy load, and maya refused do start at all. Typical error message was smth like: "Unable to dynamicaly load xxx.so File does not exist" and it was related to maya's native libraries. Moving maya to faster server, or better, copying to local drives solves the problem. So yes, it seems maya doesn't like networked install...
I wan’t all rendernodes/workstations to share the same python dir, so I can easily add new modules by just placing them in a single dir.For example, instead installing into c:\python2.6, install into \server\Apps\nt\Python2.6
This is basically my question but I can share my thoughts on python: Python is kind of dependent on the registry where it stores the default python installations. This information is e.g. used when you install python package from executable. Other than that the python path and site-packages path must be stored in the PATH environment variable. Both should could be done pointing at the server installation. If UNC paths are a problem network drives should be used. I haven’t tested this though. I thought that if someone had bad experiences I won’t even try. But since there is not much response…
This is basically my question but I can share my thoughts on python: Python is kind of dependent on the registry where it stores the default python installations. This information is e.g. used when you install python package from executable. Other than that the python path and site-packages path must be stored in the PATH environment variable. Both should could be done pointing at the server installation. If UNC paths are a problem network drives should be used. I haven’t tested this though. I thought that if someone had bad experiences I won’t even try. But since there is not much response..
I can confirm that Nuke does work well from a central location. If you have a slow connection to that central location, startup times can be extremely long. But installing once for an entire facility is quite handy.
Hugh Macdonald
[ Editor ]
I don't know about Windows, but we're Linux here and we run all our apps (Maya, Nuke, Shake) this way.
Python still runs locally.
Just a sidenote: I’m having weird problems with PyQt on a network drive installation (windows) which I have no clues on how to solve. So I will not try to force python on the server any more and will try to use py2exe for easy deployment instead.