Pron and cons of network installation?

[YaroslavSin]

Hello!
I'm like idea of network installation Creo - easy to deploy new versions.
But what about perfomance in this case?
Maybe you know another bad aspects i
n this case?
Please, share your expiriens.

[BenLoosli]

I have done network installs for the past 9 years. If you have gigabit connections from your server to the workstations, there is no noticeable performance degradation. 

I use a mapped drive to all my workstations and server that is on a large data filer. Then I install Creo to that drive and use shortcuts to the user workstations. Creo Agent, etc are installed on the server and pointed to by a batch file that I run from the parametric.bat file in the install /bin folder.

[TomU]

I do the same thing as @BenLoosli.  Creo and all of its dependents are installed to a mapped network drive.  I did a bunch of performance testing in the past.  The only real difference between a network installation and a local installation was during startup where the ~300 MB .exe file is copied over the network to launch Creo.  After that the performance was nearly identical.  We also have gigabit network connections to all of our workstations.

[YaroslavSin]

My fist thoughts was about long start Creo in this case - need to download files by network.
Looks like I need to test network installation in my local network. Now I see, that network perfomance very important.
Before I used silent installation, but this procedure still need alot time for deploing.
Thanks for sharing

[Chris3]

If you do not have gigabit connections or your network has dropped packets then the software will simply crash when a user picks a menu and it can't retrieve the data associated with that menu over the network.

[YaroslavSin]

"the software will simply crash"

Wow! Critical moment. Need to think twice before using network installation.

[TomU]

We have never had that problem, even when we were running 100 Mb connections.  Sure, startup was slower (around a minute), but after running the performance was the same as a local installation.

[Chris3]

We tested back on Wildfire so it might have changed since then. We stuck with the local installs because there was an initial lag in launch from the network server where the install was being hosted when it was spinning up the hard drives and trying to deliver that same initial data package to multiple requests at the same time.

Also every time you picked a menu it was retrieving that data from the server and sometimes there was a hiccup getting the data which lead to the program crashing without warning.

I know several large companies that have network installs though so I am sure with the right infrastructure in place it isn't a problem. It could also be that new versions have gotten better about waiting for the requested data.

[YaroslavSin]

I see several cases in PTC's knoweleg base about network installation.
Are there some officiall documentation (installation guide) from PTC?

[TomU]

It's mentioned in multiple places in the Creo Installation and Configuration Guide.

See pages 53-54, 60-63, 131, 141, and 154.  (We do not add the registry settings for our clients.)