First would be getting blades - I accumulated mine a few at a time.  $360 for a blade with dual L5520 quad-core Xeon processors and 24GB RAM, $668 for dual hex-core X5650 Xeons with 36GB (DeepDiscountServers on eBay).  Don't get a four-processor or eight-processor blade;  Windows will not acknowledge anything beyond two.

     F2 for BIOS;  set hard drive to AHCI (not IDE), and set the boot device so that force PiXiE boot is disabled (it will still check both aethernet ports at boot, but then it will check for other bootable devices).  Hard drive and USB boot need to be enabled.

Buy a Win7Pro 64bit OEM license.  $65 at SoftwarePlusTech dot com.  Buy an 8GB USB flash drive.  Buy a bare (desktop) hard drive.

     Reformat an 8GB (or bigger) flash drive to NTFS.  Copy the contents of a WIN7 install disk to the reformatted flash.  Now the NTFS flash is a bootable Win7 installer.  This step is because blades don't have an optical disc drive.    

     Park a blank hard drive in the left most tray (port 0).  Power the blade up.  It will check for PiXiE boot instructions from each aethernet port, then see an unformatted hard drive in port0, then see the bootable USB flash drive and begin booting from the flash.  You'll see "Windows is loading..."  When Windows asks where to install, choose the hard drive.  It will be formatted and have Win7 installed.  Remove the flash drive when Windows shuts down for a restart.

     Once you've gotten the blade set up, connect it via Cat6 cable to your router, and your workstation will see it as another computer on your network.  Really, Windows takes care of getting the networked computers to acknowledge each other for you.  Install Queue Manager (for Poser Pro), RenderCow (for Vue), and Lux (for Reality).

     For cooling, I have the workstations in one room with a sizeable air conditioner, and the rack is in another room with a sizeable air conditioner.  No, it is definitely *not* cool here in Ohio lately. :tongue1:  But I do use screened windows/door when the weather is mild.  You'll want the blade(s) in a remote room because their small diameter high velocity fans sound like a wee B-52 jet bomber.

     If all this seems expensive, compare what it would cost to buy a dual-processor workstation, or one with a single HyperThreaded twelve-core processor.

Poser 12, in feet.  

OSes:  Win7Prox64, Win7Ultx64

Silo Pro 2.5.6 64bit, Vue Infinite 2014.7, Genetica 4.0 Studio, UV Mapper Pro, UV Layout Pro, PhotoImpact X3, GIF Animator 5