Hi all,
Preface: Our program uses mac pros (and iMacs) while Maya, C4D, and AE are the render heavy apps. I am interested in working with the faculty to set up a distributed render system on some or all of our machines to help with student work.

Problem: I have a little knowledge of computer networks, some knowledge of Macs and Windows, and a fair bit of knowledge on rendering. The bottom line is I'm not sure where to start in looking for and setting up a distributed render manager. Okay, that's a lie, there are plenty of google searches I'm planning on doing anyway. But some help/advice is very welcome.

Goal: Ideally, a student would be able to submit jobs from Maya/mental ray, After Effects and perhaps C4D from computers on the local network, or remotely from Windows or Mac. There is a good server in place, so the renderer could write to a local drive and someone could pull the files off the server after getting a notification that the job was complete. The manager should be able to dynamically use CPUs from the macs that are not being used locally (i.e. no one is logged on). Or perhaps someone logged onto one of the computers could disable or scale back the render usage. Budget is of course an issue, but stability and flexibility are more important. I'm using eight 2xQuad core mac pros as the size of the "render farm" for quote purposes, but there are many more computers that could be included.

Question: Does anyone have experience with or knowledge of some render managers that might work for our purposes?

Thanks so much for input and advice.
Stuart