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
Well that makes me cry on the inside a little bit knowing that. I have a pretty large animation that I'm about ready to send off to the farm. I just figured Vray DR would handle it fine and that a render manager was really about having a queue as well as being able to schedule, and managing resources (not that it was absolutely needed to render out an animation with Vray DR).