WAN - Accessibilty & Installation 1

[lot]

Does anyone run SolidWorks over a WAN ? We've just purchased 6 floating licenses to be used among several sites ( geographically separated by several hundred miles ). All licenses are going to be ( note future tense ) installed at one site ( here, where I am ) and "accessed" by others.

Anyone had any experience, good or bad, any advice, any info at all on WAN? How about the LAN setup?

Thanks!

 

[MadMango]

I'm no computer expert, but I know we have some good IT guys where I work, so I asked them. This was there reply.

This is how our company does things. We (Los Angeles) have a WAN circuit with our sister company in Montreal, Canada. Our SolidWorks license server has 19 seats total, 6 belonging to Canada. With our WAN circuit (or any other WAN circuit, if it's properly configured), there's a seemless connection between the two sites. Meaning, if somebody from Canada tries to access a machine on this network, it works almost exactly like it would if they were accessing a machine on their network aside from the speed difference (our WAN is 1.5 megabit, our LAN is 100 megabit).

On that note, the drawings should be stored on the LAN in which they'll be accessed, but as far as the license server, speed isn't much of a factor since there's very little communication between SolidWorks and the license server. Now in our case, since we have a surplus of licenses, I don't bother to separate which licenses belong to Los Angeles, and which belong to Canada at the license server. If a company needed to, however, FLEXlm (the technology behind the license server) allows for license reservations... so you should be to specify that 13 SolidWorks licenses should only be leased to Los Angeles machines, and 6 should only be leased to Canada machines. This would keep us from stepping on each other's toes.

We do this with AutoCAD, which is also shared through the WAN with Canada. SolidWorks doesn't care about licensing between the US and Canada. It's all the same to them. Some other software publishers (*caugh*AutoDesk*caugh*) do care... so, if whoever's asking is talking about anything other than SolidWorks, he/she needs to speak with a vendor about what's legal, and what's not. Other than that, as far as hardware goes, the license server doesn't need much at all if this is all it does. A pentium 166 with 64mb of RAM running NT 4 is more than adequate (need a larger hard drive if they're logging usage), and the only thing that needs to be backed up are the license file, the options file (if it exists), and the report file (if it exists).

The options file is used for things like what was mentioned earlier about license reservations and such; it's where that stuff is defined. The report file, which is also defined in the options file, is where the license manager stores information on usage, but it does absolutely no good without SAMReport, which costs a lot of money (too much for us to want it). The only other hardware involved is the dongle that SolidWorks gives you for the server... so, the server does need a working bi-directional LPT port.

If you’re thinking of what SolidWorks calls a client/server installation, which means only a minimal program installation on the desktop, and most of the program files would be loaded from a server, then that'd be a bad idea over a WAN. It would take forever for SolidWorks to load. You should do a full (local) installation of SolidWorks on the desktop, and only load the license through the WAN. Of course, they could have the program files stored on a LAN server, and the licenses stored on a WAN server, but there's still a huge performance loss by not having the program installed locally. If they have the hard drive space on their desktops for a local installation, they should use it.
"The attempt and not the deed confounds us."

 

[lot]

Thanks! That's kinda what we were thinking ( we meaning those of us in the meeting which didn't include our IT guy -he loves us when we make these "assumptions" in his absence !!).

Anyway, I passed the info on to him and he's much less pessimistic than the other day.

Kudos to you.