Setup guide

5 Verify your changes by clicking the Refresh button. This queries the Backburner Manager for the most
up-to-date information. The Assigned Servers list is updated to reflect your changes.
6 Click Close to return to the list of all servers.
Delete a render node:
1 Before deleting a node, consider archiving jobs that made use of it, to preserve job details, including
the nodes to which tasks were sent.
2 On the Servers tab, select the node of interest, and click the Delete button. Only nodes marked by the
system as absent can be deleted.
3 Confirm the deletion in the dialog box that appears. The node is deleted and removed from the list.
Deleting a render node removes its entry from the database maintained by the Backburner Manager.
It does not delete any software from the node itself.
To help with network traffic, you can schedule the availability of a render node:
1 On the Servers tab, select a node of interest and click the Settings button. Alternately, double-click the
node of interest.
2 In the Server Details page, click the Weekly Schedule tab. Periods of time that are green indicate the
node is available to process jobs. By default, nodes are always available.
3 Toggle render node availability as desired:
■ Toggle a single hour by clicking the hour of interest.
■ Toggle the same hour for each day with one click using the hour buttons.
■ Click and drag to toggle a number of hours at once.
■ Toggle a whole day using the days-of-the-week buttons.
4 Apply your changes.
Server groups
A server group is a named collection of render nodes that is treated, for the most part, as if it were a single
node. By default, jobs are submitted by creative applications to the Backburner network as a whole. It is the
Backburner Manager that determines the specific render nodes to which they are sent, based on job type
and node availability. However, certain Autodesk applications can be configured to submit jobs to a specific
server group. Server groups can be used to implement a job-processing strategy. For example, consider a
facility with two Visual Effects and Finishing applications, and a render farm consisting of eight Burn nodes,
four of which are GPU-enabled. In such a situation, you might create two server groups, one each for the
non-GPU and GPU-enabled Burn nodes. By assigning each workstation to a different server group, you can
reserve the GPU-enabled Burn nodes for the workstation with higher priority or more demanding jobs.
Server groups do not restrict your ability to assign render nodes to particular jobs as you see fit. When a
creative application is configured to submit its jobs to a server group, additional nodes can be assigned to
it, automatically, or manually, once the job is on the network. Conversely, you can always remove individual
nodes from a job, regardless of their relationship to a server group. For information on configuring a creative
application to submit jobs to a server group, see the User Guide for the application of choice. Set the optional
BackburnerManagerGroup keyword in the application's init.cfg file.
Create a server group:
1 On the Server Groups tab, click the Create button.
2 Enter a name for the new server group in the Group Name field.
3 Add render nodes to the group by selecting them in the Available Servers list and moving them to the
Servers in Group list.
96 | Chapter 3 Networked processing