Just from personal experience I've had nothing but problems trying to render animations without a render manager. DR in both vray and mentalray (satellite) always works fine on a single frame then batchernder and bang problems.

I can recommend Deadline I use it and it does it job very well. As for backburner well... I'd save the frustration that comes with it and go directly to throwing PC's out the window, it's faster and it's what will happen anyway.

Dave