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Comment by jfindley | Hacker News Reader

Few years ago I spoke to some ILM people about their VDI setup, which at the time was cobbled together out of mesos and a bunch of xorg hacks to get VDI server scheduling working on a pool of remote machines with GPUs (I think they might even have used AWS intially but not sure - this is going back a fair few years now). I was doing a lot of work with mesos at the time, and we chatted a bit about this as our work overlapped a fair bit.

Are you still using a similar sort of setup to orchestrate the backend of this, and if so have you published anything about it? I've had a few people ask me about this sort of problem lately and there aren't too many great resources out there I can point people new to this sort of tech towards.

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I worked at WDAS and remember talking to the ILM team testing out the mesos VDI stuff. AFAIK it never left the POC stage but it was a really neat demo.

My team at WDAS mirrored pretty closely what Pixar did with VDI although we didn't fully switch to it for different reasons (power and heat constraints in the datacenter and price). IIRC the VDI hosts had static VMs and the teradici connection manager did all the smarts of routing user requests to a VM. There was no dynamic orchestration for us because we only had 60ish users using full VDI VMs, but even our plans of hundreds of users was still to use teradici and standard VMs on each host.

We rendered different than Pixar which also made our system a bit more static. We didn't have a separate render VM and instead rendered directly on the workstation VM when users were idle or disconnected.

I wish I could answer this, but I really can't. Not because of any NDA, just that I don't know. I wasn't involved with the workstation team at Pixar (or ILM at all); I was part of the Network and Server Admin [NSA] team, specifically focused on OpenShift. There are a lot of tools that Pixar use that I don't have the full picture of how they work together.

Here at Blue Sky we are in our infancy for thin client based work. Remote terminals aren't too new as they were used for contract workers and artists who needed to WFH on the prior show, but we don't have VDI as we still use deskside workstations. For COVID, the workstations have been retrofitted with Teradici remote workstation hostcards and we send the artists home with a VPN client and zero client, utilizing direct connect. It was enough to get us going, but we have a long road ahead in optimizing this stack and eventually (if our datacenters can handle it) switching over to VDI.

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