My Blender render farm ansible playbook.

gistfile1.txt

---
- name: Create render slaves on Rackspace Cloud
  hosts: renderslaves
  user: root 
  connection: local
  gather_facts: False
  tasks:
    - name: Provision a set of instances
      local_action:
          module: rax
          creds_file: /home/tofarley/.pyrax
          region: DFW
          networks:
          - public
          - private
          - rendernet
          name: render-slave
          flavor: 2
          image: ubuntu-1204-lts-precise-pangolin
          count: 5
          exact_count: yes
          group: slaves
          # nova keypair-add --pub-key /home/tofarley/.ssh/id_rsa.pub render_keypair
          key_name: render_keypair
          wait: yes
      register: rax

    # Add these servers (by public IP) to a group called slaves
    # so that we can ssh into them below.
    - name: Add new instance to host group
      local_action: add_host hostname={{item.accessIPv4}} groupname=slaves
      with_items: rax.instances

- name: Install Packages
  hosts: slaves
  user: root
  gather_facts: True

  tasks:
  - name: Install apt packages
    action: apt state=installed pkg={{item}} update-cache=yes
    with_items:
    - vim
    - git
    - tmux
    - blender
    tags:
    - packages

- name: Create user
  hosts: slaves
  user: root
  gather_facts: True
  vars:
    # pulled from /etc/shadow
    password: $somehash$
  tasks:
    - action: user name=tofarley password={{password}}

- name: Copy slave.blend to server
  hosts: slaves
  user: root
  gather_facts: True
  tasks:
    - copy: src=/home/tofarley/slave.blend dest=/root/slave.blend owner=root group=root mode=0644

- name: Launch blender in tmux
  hosts: slaves
  user: root
  gather_facts: True
  tasks:
    # You can attach to this session with 'tmux attach -t blender'
    - command: tmux new-session -d -s blender 'blender -b slave.blend --addons netrender -a -noaudio -nojoystick' \;