[dgrant]

Hi. I used to work at Teradici. It was always interesting that Pixar went with VDI because it meant the CPUs that were being used as desktops during the day could be used for rendering at night. Roughly speaking. The economics made a lot of sense. A guy from Pixar came to Teradici and gave a talk all about it. Amazing stuff.

Interesting contrast with other companies that switched to VDI where it made very little sense. VMware + server racks + zero clients compared to desktops never made economic sense, at the time. But oftent here is some other factor that tips things in VDI's favour.

[mroche]

Yep, all of their workstations were dual socket servers, where each socket was a workstation VM with PCIe passthrough, and each getting their own hostcard+GPU. Each VM had dedicated memory, but no ownership of the cores they were pinned to, so overnight if the 'workstations' were idle, another VM (also with dedicated memory) would spin up (the other VMs would be backgrounded) and consume the available cores and add itself to the render farm. An artist could then log in and suspend the job to get their performance back (I believe this was one of the reasons behind the checkpointing feature in RenderMan).

The Teradici stuff was great, and from an admin perspective having everything located in the DC made maintenance SO much better. Switching over to VDI is a long term goal for us at Blue Sky as well, but it'll take a lot more time and planning.

[a_e_k]

That's one reason for the checkpoint feature, yes, but there are others. A few years back (Dory-era), I participated in a talk at SIGGRAPH '15 about some of them:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2775280.2792573

http://eastfarthing.com/publications/checkpoint.pdf