Backburner Autodesk Download Center
For setting up a render farm running Maya/Mental Ray you have to get a Network License. Contact your Autodesk reseller and they will get one for you. The standard Network License includes one seat of Maya, five seats of Turtle, and five seats of Mental Ray. You will need to install Maya onto all of the computers that will be rendering as well as the workstation. Whenever you try to launch Maya on one of them they will refer to the Network License Manager(NLM), which is free to download and needs to be installed on one of the computers on your network. Preferably the server that runs Backburner Manager.
You want to install Backburner to enable network rendering with Maya.
Once it checks the NLM, as long as it sees there are no other computers running that seat it will open. The same goes for the Mental Ray or Turtle seats. When the render nodes are rendering, the only thing that has to be open is Backburner Server. It will be running the Mental Ray or Turtle plugin in the background so you won't see it running. I suggest refuring to Autodesk's Up and Ready site. It is written and updated by Autodesk specialists to help people like us figure these things out.
I hope this helps. I spent 8 months building mine and figuring out how it needed to be done as I went, so let me know if you have any other questions.
Back Burner Autodesk
Backburner for Managing and Monitoring You can install Autodesk Backburner on a machine without 3ds Max. However, such an installation of Autodesk Backburner cannot be used for rendering.
Autodesk Subscription Center
You can use this machine only to manage or monitor jobs. Although the Autodesk Backburner server can be installed on a single machine, it will not do anything; it will work only if it detects a supported program such as Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Flame, or Autodesk Smoke. This means that you must have Autodesk Backburner installed with at least one additional Autodesk product for a machine in your configuration to be capable of rendering.