For projects that allow, we are moving to Solaris/Karma. The great community here has brought valuable insight to light that reassures us in our decision.
For those of you who use Karma in production, I wonder if you could share any experience with farm management software.
With Mantra and back in the Softimage days we've been using RoyalRender and it's served us well. Since upgrading royal render would be a significant investment we're open to input for alternatives.
Although untested from my end with Karma, depending on the size of your renderfarm Deadline Free mode might be an option. Couple of months ago they increased their count of free slaves from 2 to 10. See here [docs.thinkboxsoftware.com].
I originally made a TOP's Deadline submitter that would save the Solaris flow out as a single master_render.usda file. But in the end David who I work with wrote a usd submission script working directly in deadline. Feel free to have a play.