If I had more than a couple of seats to administer, I’d definitely use it. There are a lot of cool options you can use. If you need everyone to have a specific set of settings, this is a great tool. It should be used more often, I think. I voted I’d use it depending on the situation. The main “depending” for me would be the number of seats I have to administer. I tested it a few times on my own network here at home.
I’ve been using them exclusively for many years. The biggest pros are that I can ensure everyone is set up with just the stuff they need and once I have set that up, I can use the previous image settings for the next version. We have 18 standalone licenses, 2 network licenses for Simulation Pro, Flow Simulation and SW Electrical along with a 25 seat PDM license. The admin image installs a variety of different combinations on various machines.
The only con is that you can’t modify an installation after the fact. You have to uninstall/reinstall if you forget something. The only hiccup I’ve had was that our mix of network license and standalone licenses would cause SW Electrical to always fail to install from the image if installed at the same time as non network license stuff. Once I figured out what the problem was, it was easy to set up a new group in the admin image that only installed SW Electrical. Once everything else is installed I simply move the machines that need SW Electrical into this group, do a second deploy and then move them back.
I’ve used it since it was available, before that it was scripted from the msi files (which you can still do). I have to rollout to 150 users and the admin image has a lot of nice options for configuring the software.
That said, I still use custom scripting for some things like uninstalls. I find the built in uninstaller can seem to corrupt the installation or in some weird cases will “upgrade” instead of remove and do a clean install.
I have a ton of batch scripts that run first. These are not kicked off by the admin image but instead calls for the admin image when its ready. They are used for more than just SolidWorks and collects and logs data for troubleshooting.
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We have multiple sites plus people who work from home. We have copies of the image at different sites. For those working from home, we have an option to download the image and run the installer and point it to the local copy of the image.
I’ve never really looked into it because I was advised to not use it and to proceed this way. I might look into it if we eventually upgrade from 2019, but the direction SolidWorks is heading is telling me 2019 is the last year we’ll be using, if need be there might be another transition to come.
JSculley My problem with deploy is users may or may not be in the office at the moment it decides to deploy. Installing over a poor VPN connection when the user isn’t ready can be a problem. Does it prompt the user before actually installing?
You can deploy manually to a remote machine as well, which can still be done from your desk. You simply select the machine in question, and deploy. I’m not at work at the moment, but tomorrow I’ll try to find the knowledge base article that covers what happens in the background. The user does receive a message, something like ‘A SOLIDWORKS installation is scheduled to begin in 5 minutes’.
When I was troubleshooting my SOLIDWORKS Electrical deployment problem, I found some info on what each status meant. i’ll try to find that tomorrow. Sometimes, if things get stuck, you have to tweak the status file for the particular machine so that it shows the correct info. I’ll have a look for that as well.
S-064813
Question: What can cause the SolidWorks Installation Manager based administrative image “Deploy Automatically” to display “Scheduled” even after the install succeeded?
Answer: This can occur if read/write permissions are not granted to users installing from the administrative image. At minimum, grant read/write access to the following directories as necessary:
\64bit\logs
\32bit\logs\
If the user doesn’t have access to write to the \logs\status.xml, the install might end up in a loop since the “success” value cannot be written to the administrative image.
Question: After pushing out an automatic deployment administrative image to a client computer, how do I view or edit the installation date?
Answer: To view the scheduled date of installation for an automatic deployment, follow these steps:
Go to ‘Control Panel’ > ‘Administrative Tools’ > ‘Task Scheduler’ > ‘Task Scheduler Library’.
In the list of tasks, > click on ‘Install SOLIDWORKS 20XX’.
Click on the ‘Triggers’ tab. You will see a ‘One time’ trigger for the date and time of the scheduled installation.
If the client computer is powered off or if the user is logged on at the scheduled installation time, the scheduler will attempt to install the software the next time the system starts up.
S-064813: yep, I remember the \log\ dir permissions issue from initial installations.
In solution 07028 I’d say they missed a step of connecting to remote computer. Thank you though for pointing out it uses Task Scheduler to do the installs, bit of a duh moment for me there. So I was able to look at the task on the remote machine and found that there is a problem. Would be nice if the status in the Admin Image Editor would indicate that there was an error. Anyway here’s a screen shot:
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So I look up 2147942402 (thank goodness MS got universal ResultCodes right so we can search them) sounds like missing file.
Yep, there is no StartSWInstall.exe, just the .hta file.
Any guesses why there’s no .exe file created? Wondering what I messed up…
That sounded familiar then I remembered that trying to uninstall SW from a client machine using the hta never works; complains about missing .exe.
Can I assume that the StartSWInstall.exe is universal, so long as it’s from the same version and SP? If I find one I can use it? I’m assuming the Admin Image Opt Editor doesn’t compile or edit that .exe file.
We use Admin images to manage about 120 installations globally. Like others, I have a script to do some housekeeping things BEFORE calling the admin image. We use Microsoft’s SCCM software deployment tool to schedule and manage the actual deployment.
I do not that SW 2021 now has the option of compressed admin images. I was using that trick on my own images a number of years ago, since SCCM was having trouble deploying a package over about 10GB. Nice to see that built-in now so I can remove that bit of code from my own installation process.
I’ve been using them for a while. We don’t have a ton of users, but it saves me from having to go “desk to desk” and do the installation/setup for them. It’s nice to configure it to keep the modules user’s won’t really need as part of their role from being on their machine using the groups. Although I did have to get into writing batch scripts to get add-ins installed and registry tweaks completed, it was really a relatively painless process. Of 50ish users, only 5-6 reached out to me for help. If you do it once, you learn a lot and know a bit more of what to do the next go-around.
