CAD Worker as a VM?

[mdebower]

Hey there...

I have done a quick search and could not find a definitive answer. Can you create a VM for the CAD Worker? Or does it require a physical machine with graphics card?

-marc

CAD / PLM Systems Manager

[Marco_Tosin]

Hi Marc,

we use a VM machine for the CAD Worker since 2009.

It's a Win 2008 R2 server, with a WMware SVGA 3d graphic card.

[TomU · Accepted solution]

No, the publisher uses a non-graphical session of Creo and therefore will not use or leverage a graphics card at all. I have our CAD worker running on a Windows 7 VM with a mere 12 MB assigned to the virtual graphics card and it's working great.

Make sure you get a node locked license for your worker (either the free visualization license or some other license). This will allow you to run as many simultaneous Creo sessions as you want, as long as you give the worker sufficient resources. I'm running 15 sessions of Creo concurrently on one VM with one license and it's working great! There are some caveats to getting this working correctly though, so let me know if you need the details.

[mdavis-2]

Tom, I would definitely like to know the details on avoiding VM Cad worker caveats. Thanks! -Marvin

[TomU]

Sorry for the delay. Basically you need to do the following:

On the CAD worker

1. Create a dedicated user account for each worker.
2. Create a dedicated GS Worker daemon process for each worker (using the accounts from step 1)
3. Create a unique folder and adapter config for each worker
4. Manually modify the worker scripts with the "-DA" option
5. Manually modify each proestartup.bat file with "taskkill" line
6. Optional - create dedicated upload subfolders for each worker. (Before I did this I had some issues with different workers attempting to create folders with the same name causing write conflicts.)

On the server

1. Add entries to the "hosts" file for the additional "phantom" worker machines
2. Add the additional workers to the Worker Agent Administration. (I found this easier to do by hand with a text editor. The file is located at <wt_home>\conf\wvs\agent.ini .)
3. If using shared folders, leave the agent.ini lines for username and password blank (these are for ftp only)
4. Create additional publish queues, one for each worker.
5. Optional - create a dedicated background method server for WVS.

This is all covered in these articles:

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS29308

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS43769

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS41866

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS162756

And of course, the Visualization Services Guide (10.2 M020)

http://support.ptc.com/WCMS/files/157363/en/WindchillVisualizationServicesGuide_10-2_M020.pdf

Let me know if you have any questions. If there is enough interest I could probably put some type of actual guide together.

[GregOlson]

Tom,

I would be very intrested in a guide, if you have time. We have two worker machines (CAD workstations) that we would really like to give back to engineering.

Greg

[BjoernRueegg]

Hey Tom

Do you create multiple worker (multiple proe_setup directories and multiple worker defined in PDMLink) to run multiple instances on the same machine?

Thanks

Björn

[TomU]

Yes. Each worker has it's own directory, has it's own GS Worker daemon, runs under it's own administrative account, etc.

I also found that it helps to give each worker it's own upload folder. Before I did this different workers would sometimes try to create folders with the same name. Obviously one of them would fail (write error).

[TomU]

I also found that it helps to give each worker it's own upload folder. Before I did this different workers would sometimes try to create folders with the same name. Obviously one of them would fail (write error).

Okay, slight correction to this. There are two separate sporadic issues I'm dealing with.

Problem creating directory <path>. It already exists as a file

Problem creating directory <path>. Do not have write access

Creating separate upload folders for each worker was an attempt to deal with the first error. Unfortunately it's still occurring for individual workers within their own folders. For now I have stopped using dedicated folders just to see if that increases the folder conflicts.

The second error has to do with the Windchill method server service account and folder permissions on the worker. I do not understand why most of the time it could access the files just fine and then other times it would choke, but the solution is to run Windchill's services under a domain account with permissions on the CAD worker machine. Here are two relevant articles from PTC's tech support site:

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS33760

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS60687

[BjoernRueegg]

We also recommend to run the worker in a VM. Just check how much RAM it takes to open up the biggest assembly and pack some more (e.g. 4GB) on top. So the worker doesn't have any problems to convert all the models.

Björn

[TomU]

When I first set our system up with multiple workers I increase the vCPU count to 16 and the vRAM to 80 GB. I've since backed off some. I really need to go back and see what it really needs and pare this back some more.

With this setup I'm averaging 1 publish per second (86,000 per day). I needed this for a bulk re-publish of over a million objects.

[LoriSood]

Marc,

It looks like you got a lot of good answers here. Did you get what you needed?

[hvaradharajan-2]

Hi,

Anyone tried with using Windows Server 2008 as a Office Document worker ? (Iam not talking about Adobe Livecycle Server).

Can we have one machine to be a multiple worker ? (Multiple Doc worker or Multiple CAD Worker)

Thanks

Hari