SOLIDWORKS Electrical IT Architecture

What constitutes a great installation, migration, or upgrade with SOLIDWORKS Electrical and the SOLIDWORKS Solutions? An informed audience of Users, IT Administrators, and Management, in conjunction with your friendly neighborhood SOLIDWORKS Product Gurus.

Keeping all the experts in mind, I’ve shared my experience with the SOLIDWORKS Electrical IT Architecture.

First there are 2 types of electrical application environments:

1. Standalone Single User install, and
2. Client-Server install

Standalone Single User install

For the most part, the SOLIDWORKS wizard will prompt you through a seamless install or upgrade for standalone environment.

Such changes must occur with windows administrator privileges switched on.

The application production environment gets a little complicated when attempting to merge with existing IT architecture and processes. Image below shows a single user installation.

Single User Installation

Client-Server Install

Since the application runs an SQL Database, there are considerations to be made for Client-Server environment:

1. SQL Express is default with Electrical. If you have more than 6 concurrent users, a full licensed version of SQL is a must.
2. If you are not performing a simple out of box install using the SW wizard tools, you must assign the SQL instance in a mixed mode.
3. Custom Installs require that user’s windows credentials are added to the SQL instance. The default SQL user for Electrical will be set during the application install.
4. Inbound and outbound rules need to be set for the following ports 1433 TCP, 26666-26672 TCP and 1434 UDP
5. Document the “sa” password for your SQL product. Trying to change SQL configs without this key will cost you time.

Components that constitute the Electrical Application infrastructure are shown below:

Components of Electrical Application Environment

These components can be rearranged in configurations for various types of setups.

Application Operational Routines

One of the important segments of such environments is regular backup and save as processes.

To put it simply, if specific data sets are required to be backed up, the electrical product interface allows to pull those segments out for back up.

Data sets can be projects, symbols, manufacturing parts, or even all user defined title blocks.

Our time tested recommendation is always Backup your Projects in stages and once a month conduct a  Backup of the Application environment.

Note: Always perform Archive Environment before any major IT infrastructure change, it is imperative that this step is conducted to avoid data loss.

Read more about saving/backing up data at SolidWorks Electrical : The Archive Environment, Part 1 and SolidWorks Electrical: The Archive Environment, Part 2