Chapter 1 - Introduction

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Overview Overview
Audience Audience
What You Must Know What You Must Know
How to Use This Guide How to Use This Guide
How This Guide Is Organized How This Guide Is Organized

Overview

Welcome to the CATIA Migration from UNIX to Windows Guide. This guide is designed to provide CATIA administrators, network managers, and operating system administrators the best information available on issues that they are likely to face while planning or implementing CATIA version 5 in Microsoft Windows operating system environments. In addition, a significant portion of this document provides the detailed instructions to deploy CATIA in a large engineering environment and administer it remotely and efficiently.

About CATIA V5

CATIA version 5 is a process-centric computer-aided design/computer-assisted manufacturing/computer-aided engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) system that fully uses next generation object technologies and leading edge industry standards. Seamlessly integrated with Dassault Systemes Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, it enables users to simulate the entire range of industrial design processes from initial concept to product design, analysis, assembly, and maintenance. The CATIA V5 product line covers mechanical and shape design, styling, product synthesis, equipment and systems engineering, NC manufacturing, analysis and simulation, and industrial plant design. In addition, CATIA Knowledgeware enables broad communities of users to easily capture and share know-how, rules, and other intellectual property (IP) assets.

CATIA V5 builds on powerful smart modeling and morphing concepts to enable the capture and reuse of process specifications and intelligence. The result is an easily scaleable, Web-enabled system that covers all user requirements within the digital extended enterprise, from the simplest design to the most complex processes. This capability allows optimization of the entire product development process while controlling change propagation. CATIA V5 moves beyond traditional parametric or variational approaches, accelerating the design process and helping designers, engineers, and manufacturers increase their speed and productivity.

CATIA V5 has an innovative and intuitive user interface that unleashes the designer's creativity. Context-sensitive integrated workbenches provide engineers with the tools they need for the task at hand, and they are beneficial for multi-discipline integration. The workbenches have powerful keyboard-free direct object manipulators that maximize user productivity.

CATIA V5 applications are based on a hybrid modeling technology. These applications provide expanded digital product definitions, process definitions, and review functions capable of operating on projects with any degree of design complexity. CATIA V5 has produced domain-specific applications that have addressed global digital enterprise requirements that span the areas of mock-up, manufacturing, plant, and operations.

CATIA V5 expands scalability across processes, functions, and platforms to deliver the right solution to the desktop of each team member in the product development chain. Tailored solutions meet the needs of a broad range of users, from a small supplier shop to a large multinational corporation.

CATIA V5 on Windows

This is the first version of CATIA that can be run on either UNIX or Windows. You can select an operating system to match your corporate IT strategy. For example, if your other office and technical applications all run on Windows, you can move CATIA to that environment and eliminate the need for UNIX. This system will be more convenient to use because users can access all applications from a single workstation, and it will be easier to administer because the integration of UNIX and Windows is no longer necessary.

If you choose to run CATIA V5 on Windows, a number of key questions and issues will occur: How should the installation be configured? Which Windows services will need to be configured? How can the administrative effort involved be minimized? If you have been running CATIA V4 on UNIX, you must consider the migration of your existing data to the new environment and the communication between UNIX and Windows during the migration. These are the questions and issues this guide was written to address.

The information included in this guide is gathered from consultants working in the field, tests carried out to prove the concepts, and from customer issues that have already been confronted and solved during migration. The amalgamation of this experience constitutes current best practices.

Audience

This guide is intended for those companies considering, or committed to, running CATIA V5 on Windows. Its content will interest both the Information Technology (IT) department and, to a lesser extent, the design department.

Heads of IT, senior systems administrators, and system architects will be interested in the design decisions involved in the entire migration process. These include both large scale decisions, such as the choice of where to install CATIA, and more detailed choices, such as how to migrate a particular type of CATIA data file. Design managers and senior CATIA design engineers should help inform these decisions because of their end user expertise, and so portions of this guide are also of interest to them. Once the project plan has been completed, other administrators will find the step-by-step procedures helpful.

What You Must Know

Some knowledge of Windows and UNIX has been assumed. You should be aware of the basic differences between the two environments, such as path syntax, file name conventions, the storage of configuration information, and network communication protocols.

Chapter 6, CATIA Data Migration, requires a detailed knowledge of CATIA V4 data files and a little of V5.
Chapter 7, Migration Custom Applications and Scripts, provides an introduction to methods for moving customized UNIX-based code to Windows. This chapter can be read by those with little or no development experience, although expert coders are required to perform the migration.

How to Use This Guide

The move to CATIA V5 is likely to be a complex process, presenting many challenges, even in a relatively small organization. With this in mind, the importance of thoroughly planning your project before executing it cannot be over-emphasized. The guide has been structured to discuss concepts before procedures so that you gain a thorough understanding of all the issues to be evaluated prior to the actual migration. This should prevent costly errors that may take great effort to correct.

Chapter 2, Planning a CATIA Unix to Windows Migration, begins with a discussion of the top level decisions that will determine the overall flow of your migration project and the general design of the resulting system. The design decisions made in this chapter will affect the relevance of the content in later chapters. For example, Chapter 3, CATIA Local Installation, will be less relevant if a decision was made after reading Chapter 2 to use a code server installation. Each of Chapters 38 are structured so that design issues are discussed at the beginning, followed by detailed procedural information collected in sections titled Methodologies."

The Appendix presents extensive tests that have been performed in a laboratory environment on a CATIA code server installation. You can use these test results to plan hardware and software configurations that will respond quickly to user requests and to avoid bottlenecks. The model presented in the Appendix should be consulted prior to finalizing the migration project plan.

How This Guide Is Organized

  • Chapter 1 Introduction. The current chapter gives a brief overview of CATIA and describes the purpose of this document.

  • Chapter 2 Planning a CATIA UNIX to Windows Migration. This chapter discusses the major architectures that you can use to implement CATIA. The concepts described can have far-reaching effects on the resulting system.

  • Chapter 3 CATIA Local Installation. If you have decided to install CATIA on each workstation, this chapter is important. It gives further details on the installation process and includes discussions of tools that can be used to automate the process. These tools can save you a great deal of time if you have many workstations.

  • Chapter 4 CATIA Code Server Installation. This chapter is relevant if you have chosen to install CATIA on a centralized server to which clients will connect to run it. The special configurations required on both server and client are described. Methods of optimizing the performance of such a configuration are also included.

  • Chapter 5 Setting Up SupportingServices. Services necessary to support CATIA operations, including license use management, printers, and conferencing tools, are described in this chapter.

  • Chapter 6 CATIA Data Migration. If you have existing CATIA data files, you will probably need to move them from UNIX to Windows and from CATIA V4 to V5. This chapter details this migration.

  • Chapter 7 Migrating Custom Applications and Scripts. Techniques to migrate custom applications and scripts are described in this chapter.

  • Chapter 8 UNIX-Windows Interoperability and Data Sharing. This chapter describes the techniques you can use to communicate between the two operating systems. You will need this information for the migration and for the longer term if you wish both UNIX and Windows to remain in place.

  • Chapter 9 Conclusions. This chapter reviews key points.

  • Appendix Scalability, Performance, and Capacity Testing. Extensive tests have been performed against a CATIA V5 code server system. The details and results, presented here, can be used to correctly size your system and ensure it can cope with user load easily.

Disclaimer and Copyright Information

CATIA is a registered trademark of Dassault Systemes SA. The names of other actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.