Anyone using VDI machines as CAD Workers?

[hvaradharajan]

Hi all,

We are running Windchill 10.2 , and we have setup around 10 CAD workers, for solidworks 2014. 5 of them are Virtual Machines - VDI and we have the remaining 5 as physical machines, these physical machines are only as backup CAD workers.

In the event that no publishing happens during holidays, then these VDIs are automatically released and become inactive, then suddenly when the CAD document checkin happens, these CAD workers wont fire again.

My question is whether VDI as CAD worker is supported / recommended by PTC?

Are there 3rd party publishing controllers that can be hosted in a single server machine, rather than 5 CAD workers?

we are looking at a robust publishing engine that is not as fragile as the multiple CAD workers, time out issues, start up issues, license issues..all those headaches.

Thanks

Hari

[TomU]

Hari,

*** Disclaimer - Creo specific information.  Not sure if SolidWorks is the same. ***

We currently use one virtual machine for our Creo publisher.  It is configured with 15 separate CAD workers, 16 vCPUs and 128 GB RAM.  Since it's virtual we can adjust these resources as needed.  Most of the time only a couple of the workers are actually running, but it sure is nice to have all 15 available when a large assembly get's checked in! 

I don't think PTC explicitly talks about virtual vs. physical for workers, but they do discuss how to configure multiple workers on the same machine.  We've been very happy with the workers running on a virtual machine (Win7 on VMware).

You might want to read through this discussion: CAD Worker as a VM?

[BineshKumar1]

Going behind the logic of CAD workers, irrespective of the product you use,  it will have to download CAD files from server, open it in non graphical mode, convert it to non native formats and upload it back. So I am not sure whether you can completely get rid of any of those challenges which you have mentioned ( time out issues, start up issues, license issues).

VDI with load based startup/shutdown sounds bit complicated for a CAD worker type application.

What Tom has for Creo is surely a more robust approach and we do have several installations running with that configuration. A robust alternate would be to switch to a two worker machines(VMs ) with multiple CAD workers.VMWare has Dynamic Resource Scheduling  and Power management. If the resources are not utilities, it is going to power down /power down the physical hosts based on guest VMs resource usage.

Workers are loaded based on number of numbered publishing queues. One feature which you can use availabletime worker configuration, identify busy time for worker and switch on workers on those specific timezones. For e.g. "availabletime=7:00 pm-6:00 am, 5:00 am-8:00 pm - mon, 5:00 am- 8:00 pm - tues" You can lookup for more info on visualization guide.

Thanks

Binesh Kumar

Barry Wehmiller

[hvaradharajan-2]

Hi,

Anyone tried with using Windows Server 2008 as a Office Document worker ? (Iam not talking about Adobe Livecycle Server).

Can we have one machine to be a multiple worker ? (Multiple Doc worker or Multiple CAD Worker)

Thanks

Hari