manage render farm

[efi_ex]

Hello

I'm searching for soloution to manage a render farm with 35 machines.
I started to use vhd, but the problem is that when the software gets updated we have to copy over the whole image, also we want to be able to handle all this over lan.
So I'm not 100% sure if we can solve these problems with using ipxe, so has anyone expirience with managing many pc's over lan or web.

thx
Hannes

[robinsmidsrod]

First things first, what OS does your render farm software work on, and is it possible to run from a ramdisk environment? If you run it on Linux creating a custom kernel+initrd with buildroot or the like should be doable (but not trivial). If you use Windows, it is possible Windows PE might be enough for you to run the system. If that is the case, look into WAIK or ADK for creating your custom PE ramdisk. There are some howto's on the main http://ipxe.org website that talks about how to add additional files to the WinPE boot.wim file.