Backburner remote rendering Design

[Anonymous]

Background:

I'm a junior linux sysadmin with a lot of powerful servers sitting idle until end of year. My friend and new business partner works for an architectural firm and pitched an idea. We want to start a realistic architectural rendering business using either Maya or 3ds. I'm trying to wrap my head around how to design this system. 

Thoughts:

He will work from his residence while my servers reside at my residence across the city. We have 300mbps symmetrical internet connections. I think the way to do this is to have a network accessible drive at my residence for the project files. Does this sound correct? This way all render nodes and the developer/artist can access the same files without a need to shuffle them around the internet. Does that work or is there another way? 

I'm not certain how to actually start the render process in the first place. Does the artist work locally but RDP to the remote network with a render manager running backburner to start the render process? 

I'm pretty ignorant here, though tech savvy much, much more with linux and willing to learn with windows all the same. Does anyone here have experience rendering to a server farm remotely? 

[dembkod]

Webeindustry

I know this is an older post, but I wanted to post to get some info out there- in case someone searching the forum has the same issue.

Render farms can certainly be tricky and though I do not have experience in the area you are describing I do know that we have users with remote render farms that seem to work well. As for options to how you may configure your farm, you may have better luck at the Maya forum directly.

Thank you for taking part in our community!

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply. We are setup with 3DS & Vray using a VPN to remotely & securely connect. We ended up using multiple networked drives accessible after tapping into the VPN. I even automated a process to take finished project files from one networked drive linked to the VPN (only outside connection to internet) , compress and encrypt, and store in the cloud every morning. 

It's been a bit of a headache, but learned a lot and everything we wanted has been figured out.