Chapter 9 - Conclusion

CATIA V5 is turning out to be the design tool preferred by most organizations in the automobile, aerospace, and manufacturing industries. Windows is becoming more popular in the engineering environment as the platform for all engineering tools, including CATIA. If you have decided to run CATIA V5 on Windows, it is important to evaluate all the deployment options. By selecting the most appropriate option for your needs, you can implement a scalable, stable, and highly available design system with the minimum administrative overhead.

Where CATIA should be installed is one of the first questions to be considered. Traditionally, local installation on all workstations has been considered to provide the best performance and least network traffic. However, the Appendix to this document shows that, with Offline Folders and DFS, a code server can perform as well as a local installation in these respects.

Code serving of the CATIA application not only reduces the overhead for packaging, deployment, and distribution, but also almost eliminates administration of CATIA V5 on workstations. With this type of installation, only OLE records, shortcuts, fonts, and two lines in the etc\services files are deployed locally on workstations. This solution, which is similar to many UNIX CATIA systems, avoids heavy local installations.

If you have a large number of workstations in your system, you will appreciate automated installation of CATIA on workstations, especially with local installation. There are many packaging and deployment tools available to help with this. The one you choose will depend on budget, workstation numbers, whether you have already rolled out Windows, and other factors.

When migrating to Windows from an existing UNIX-based CATIA V4 setup, you must ensure that existing data is migrated smoothly and that none is lost or made unusable. Furthermore, if you have added to CATIA with your own custom code, you will be keen to retain this, without major rewriting, because of the investment it represents.

Finally, any UNIX to Windows migration will require these two operating systems to interoperate, whether it is for the purposes of issuing commands, ensuring security, or sharing files.

These are the principal areas your migration project will concentrate on. If you ensure that each of them is fully planned for and thoroughly thought out, your project should run smoothly with few headaches.

You will find details of tests carried out on CATIA to determine its performance and scalability on Windows in the Appendix. Also included are recommendations for and the limitations of each setup.

For more information and further reading, see the "References" chapter.

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