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NFS Client

Overview

Flamenco assumes there is a common network file-store available to workstations and the Cluster.

The NFS file share hosts Blender Projects, Job data and the rendered PNGs. Flamenco uses a propretary file manager called Shaman which provides an application file manager sitting over NFS.

Render output type in Blender projects should be set to PNG. This is so that Workers can track and create individual frames as PNGs in parallel in each Flamenco Task.

By default, the project creates an NFS Server is known in the Cluster Network as nfs.cluster.home or `flamenco.cluster.home.

Tip

Note you may need administration permissions to add/change filesystem mounts on the workstation.

Example Setup

We are assuming the two-variable shared-storage paths are correct in this example.

In summary…

Entity Value
NFS Share Name /nfs/share/
nfs.cluster.home Network IP address of server

These are the example mount points…

Platform/Machine Mount Point
Windows Client Remote Drive F:\flamenco
MacOS Client Volume /private/nfs/flamenco
Linux Client Mount /media/shared/flamenco

Note, on this page, the NFS server is on the Gateway Device at nfs.cluster.home in this project however it may not be hosted by the Gateway Device and could be its own appliance.

If you cannot use these mount points, then you can change them to suit your needs. See Cluster NFS Mount Details section below.

NFS Mount Examples for Windows, Linux and MacOS and Flamenco Shared Storage example when there are multiple workstation platforms.

Server Setup

Please see documentation / technical / installation / nfs for NFS Server setup on Linux host.

The Samba Server is setup in parallel to allow easier, secure access from Windows and MacOS workstations.

Flamenco Shared Storage

The NFS mounts may differ due to operation system (platform) or however your NAS/NFS environment is setup.

Flamenco has a mechanism to provide cross-platform conversion of NFS paths using Flamenco Two-Way Variables.

On Windows, MacOS and Linux it is likely the NFS mount point is different. Flamenco “Two-Way” Environment variables allow you to specify mapping and are useful in mapping NFS mount points across different platforms.

This has pre-configured Two-Way variable shared_storage that defines platform defined in the flamenco_manager.yaml that is co-located with the Flamenco Manager in the cluster.

The platform keyword is reserved and can be one of windows, linux or darwin.

  shared_storage:
    is_twoway: true
    values:
    - platform: linux
      value: /media/shared/flamenco
    - platform: windows
      value: F:\flamenco
    - platform: darwin
      value: /private/nfs/flamenco/

The Cluster Worker nodes use the linux Mount Point. (details)

See note on absolute bake cache paths.

References

  1. Using Flamenco over OpenVPN.