V-Ray Distributed rendering (DR) Spawner uses some Backburner resources, which is why Backburner should be installed on the machine that will be used for DR.
In the installation notes below,
using distributed rendering is described in great detail. We
required just one normal Backburner job to be run on each version of 3ds Max in
order to use V-Ray DR. After that V-Ray DR works independently.
Using V-Ray Distribution Rendering along with a Backburner is possible but it requires a special way of submitting the jobs.
Currently there is no render manager software that supports V-Ray distributed
rendering (DR). The reason is that the V-Ray distribution of buckets for
rendering acts as a kind of render manager (like Backburner) but its principles of
distribution of tasks are different than the frame distribution provided by
Backburner. Backburner distributes only the whole frame (it is sending a frame
or more to each machine in the pool) whereas V-Ray DR divides each
frame into small portions (buckets which are distributed over the machines in
the pool). This kind of distribution is not handled by any render manager.
If Backburner is used to launch a job with V-Ray Distributed rendering
enabled, the job must include only one machine. This machine could be any in your office ; it simply becomes the distributed rendering manager (server). The V-Ray DR process
requires a render server and render slaves where the render server is the machine
that initiates the rendering. The render server also distributes the buckets for calculating during
the render job to all machines (render slaves) that are listed in the Distributed Rendering options of the scene.