Setting Up Solidworks PDM on AWS

Don’t do it - switch to Onshape (more on that later)

However, if you can’t switch to Onshape here are some recommendations and guides that will hopefully make the process somewhat less painful.

Recommendations

1 Start with an expectation that many things will go wrong, and budget 3 full days of work for setup

2 Only ever refer to your server by its hostname

If you don’t have a nameserver set up, just put in the time to do it. PDM will let you refer to the server by IP address early in the installation process, but it will break later in incredibly painful ways

3 Enable telnet on your client computer and use it for debugging

This is by far the best way I’ve found for determining whether a problem is on the server / AWS security settings side or the client side. Once telnet is activated, open the command prompt and type telnet mypdmserver 3030, where mypdmserver is replaced with your server hostname and 3030 is the PDM port (should be standard). If you see a blank window and a flashing cursor, it worked and the problem is likely on the client side.

4 Never tell Solidworks support if you are using an unsupported computer or graphics card

I have not once seen this be the cause of a problem over 10 years of using Solidworks, but they will basically refuse to support you until you get on to a supported machine.

Detailed Guides

With those recommendations in mind, I’d go through the following sequence.

Set up AWS

The instance type we’ve used is t2.medium and seemed to work fine. There’s nothing particularly special about the AWS setup, other than to make sure that the correct version of Windows Server and SQL are installed, and that the correct ports are open in the server’s security group. The license manager uses 235734 / 235735, PDM server uses 3030, and SQL uses 1433 / 1434. I also recommend you at least temporarily enable ping on your server and in AWS’s settings so that you can check connectivity without requiring that the Solidworks software be running on the server (as would be the case with telnet).

Install PDM server and license manager

This guide seems to be suitable for most installations, and a heavier weight guide is available as well if something goes wrong or more detail seems needed.

Install software on your client computer

…aka your CAD machine

I’m assuming you’re mostly familiar with this, but one gotcha I’ll remind you of is not to type in a serial number if you have a network Solidworks license, but rather click the ‘log in’ button in the installation manager. Also remember to install PDM along with Solidworks in this installation (it’s a checkbox somewhere).

Connect to the vault

1 Create an ODBC / SQL connection (I have absolutely no idea what this is, but our support people walked us through it and it solved a problem)

2 Set up your local ‘vault view’ (aka connect to the vault)

Summary

So that covers some of the fixes we’ve used to handle PDMs problems. Inevitably you’ll find your own, so lean on telnet to determine which side of the connection the issue is occurring on.

Lastly, use every opportunity available to you to shame Solidworks into rethinking this awful system (conferences, talks with your reseller, etc). They’re not going to fix it without loud displays of user dissatisfaction.