We fixed an issue on the 64 bit installer of Muster 6 Tech preview. Who experienced failures starting the Console application can download the new installer from the same location.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Muster 6 technical preview.
While the evaluation of the technical preview is available for everyone, valid temporary licenses of the technical preview of Muster 6 are available only to existing 5.X customers.
License requests can be filled here, while the installers are available here.
A new forum section has been opened to host discussions about the technical preview, bugs and features requests.

We are pleased to announce the technical preview of Muster 6 that will be available in late June. Muster 6 is the first release of Muster that will be totally cross-platform introducing "Muster Console", the graphical front-end resulted by merging Explorer and Management Console. Muster Console has been written from scratch and will be available for Windows, Linux and the Macintosh platform. While the official release of Muster 6 introduces several new features, the technical preview will be some sort of beta available to customers to test the new Muster Console with the same feature sets of Muster 5. It will be installable side-by-side with Muster 5.

Starting from 29 May 2009, customers that will purchase Muster 5 licenses will be automatically elegible for a Muster 6 license as soon as it becames available.

Muster 5.5.7 is available for download in our download section. It introduces some minor non critical fixes on the Explorer and on the Mac platform. This is the last update to the version 5 family before the release of Muster 6 planned for September.

Virtual Vertex is proud to announce the new web site and the new forum. The new forum system has been integrated in our new site to provide a better discussion point and host the new channels required for Muster 5 discussions. The old forum is still available to users searching for solutions related to previous versions of Muster.

Users reported issues triggered while trying to register on our new forums. We detected and isolated the problem and everything is working fine now. If you registered in the previous days and still waiting for the activation e-mail, you'll find your account already active.

Virtual Vertex is proud to announce the release of Muster 5. After 4 years (2000-2004) of deep work on the previous Muster versions, interviews and stress testings on the field, Virtual Vertex toke a deep breath and moved toward a redesigned version of Muster with high-end facilities in mind.

We realized that end users working with distributed renderings and data processing, a such complex topic, need better flexibility, better performances and state of the art stability. The previous code base of Muster is born modifing and integrating , year after year, that's why we realized that it was no longer good for an enterprise environment and for the next generation of softwares and hardwares.

In 2004, Virtual Vertex started the process of rebuilding Muster from scratch with new objectives in mind, the most important of building a suite of tools for distributed processing management ready for the next challenges, ready for the new hardware with an high degree of extensibility.

After 2 years of work, Muster 5 is born. The entire code base has been rewritten from scratch, it targets multiple platforms with no sensible differences in behaviours across Windows, Linux and Apple OS X.
Muster 5 also includes some major differences from previous versions to extend the extensibility of the software itself and increase the scalability level by adding an integrated templates macro language to bind external packages, SQL driven job queue using an inprocess database or an external Mysql installation, 64 Bit ready codebase, fully featured integrated AJAX based web management interface as well as an internal historing system for data and performances processing.

We have also changed drastically our license scheme, now Muster 5 comes in a single site-based license without limits to the supported engines, or a node-count locked license. Users can easily integrate new render engines by writing new templates without worrying about their license.

To end users that need something more, we also provide quotes for ad-hoc customization and even a source-code license for full customization. If you want to learn more about the difference between previos versions, we strongly suggest you to read the What's new in Muster 5 document or move to the Muster page for a detailed list of features.

We wish to thanks all our customers that supported us during those years, we made this with your precious help.

Leonardo Bernardini
Lead Developer
Virtual Vertex