Strategy Tester's Local farm network

[fryderykchopin]

I'm in the process of building a local farm network but there are a couple of important points for which I couldn't find an answer:

1. I have several relatively powerful computers but one of them is much older and clearly much slower (an old Intel Core i3 processor). My plan is to use this old computer as a "scheduler" for backtesting jobs. To do this, I plan to run a full installation of MetaTrader 5 in that old computer but disabling the local agents, so that only the other computers in the local network can execute backtests. Offloading the scheduling workload to the old/slow computer should have two benefits: a) The computational power of the other computers would be used only for running backtests, so no scheduling overhead in any of them; b) The scheduling workload should not be demanding so in principle an old computer should be able to run it, giving some practical use to the old computer which otherwise would not be used at all. Is my reasoning correct? Will this work as expected or am I missing something?
   
2. The computers in the local farm network are interconnected directly with a switch and ethernet cables. I have the possibility to connect the switch to an institutional network with a DHCP server. This would assign public IP addresses to each computer in the local farm. One advantage of this is that I don't need to configure IP addresses manually for each computer. Another advantage is that the whole setup can be controlled remotely. However, I'm not sure what would happen if I switch the whole setup off for a few days, then turn it on again. Would the computer running MT5 be able to detect the agents in the other computers if their IP addressed have changed? Would I need to re-add the agents manually every time I switch the setup off and on?

Any advice would be appreciated.