SOLIDWORKS 2021 Install Guide - Part 3 SOLIDWORKS Electrical

SOLIDWORKS Electrical can be broken down into two parts: SQL Metadata and Electronic Program Data.

SQL Metadata has

• All data about everything… (All the CAD document data is contained here.)

Electronic Program Data

• Program Files – The application (without this the program will not run).
• Program Data – The data (without it the program will run…but will have no content)

Licensing scheme for SOLIDWORKS Electrical:

• SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic
• SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D
• SOLIDWORKS Electrical Professional (limited to 1 PC)

Use the SOLIDWORKS Installation Manager. The installation manager is a simplified process that will help guide you through the install.

First a few important questions…

• Do you want to share the data now or in the future?
• How many people will share the data?
• Do you want to use an existing SQL Server instance?

Is it a local or server installation?

Individual

There are two scenarios when installing SOLIDWORKS Electrical for a single-user local installation. You can start with a new install/upgrade or add it to an existing installation of SOLIDWORKS. To access the download for the software, please refer to the first part of our installation guide here: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 1 – Individual Installation (cati.com)

New Install/Upgrade

Please select the “Install on this computer” option and click “Next”.

Adding to an Existing Installation

Please select the “Modify your installation” option and click “Next”.

On the next page, you can add the serial number for SOLIDWORKS Electrical. If the SOLIDWORKS Electrical software is included with your serial number for SOLIDWORKS, you can leave the serial number field empty for SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic. After your serial number(s) have been entered, click “Next”.

The Product Selection page and the “More” button on the Summary page give you the options to install the desired products and configure the file locations, etc. The below image shows the appropriate settings for an Individual Install with the end user machine being the SQL Server host. Under Products click “Change” and then check the boxes for SOLIDWORKS Electrical and its associated installation components:

• SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic
• SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D (SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD is required to install and use this)
• Collaborative server
• Data

Click “Next” to get to the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Options menu.

• Specify the SQL Server Name and Data Location
• All other settings can be customized as desired after the default “localhost” entry (ex. SQL Server: “localhostTEW_SQL2020”)

Please enter your existing SQL Server instance settings by selecting “Change”. By default, the SQL Server Authentication login password for the “sa” user is blank if you’re not sure what to enter here. These steps are only required if SOLIDWORKS Electrical is already in use at your organization.

If you have not set up a SQL Server instance before, you can install a new one on the next page. You can specify the name of the new instance and give it a password below. The password must meet Windows security requirements, which you can find more information on in the “Potential Errors” section at the bottom of this article.

Click “Back to Summary” to return to the Summary page and click “Install Now” (or “Modify Now” if adding to an existing installation of SOLIDWORKS).

If you are upgrading an existing installation of SOLIDWORKS Electrical, you will arrive at the System Check Warnings page below after clicking “Next” from the Product Selection page. It is likely that you already have an existing SQL Server instance on your system, so you can safely proceed with using the information already saved from the previous version.

Please take note of the warning shown in the previous image above. It’s important that you create a backup of your environment in SOLIDWORKS Electrical by creating an Environment Archive before upgrading an existing install. Please open your current SOLIDWORKS Electrical installation and access File -> Archive Environment from the Command Ribbon as shown below:

By creating an Environment Archive, you can prevent potentially losing data due to a failed upgrade. In fact, we recommend that you create Environment Archives regularly for that peace of mind if your system experiences a hardware failure or data corruption. From the Archiving Environment wizard, click “Next” and proceed to archive “All objects” on the next page. You can change your selections as needed on the following pages. Once your selection is ready to be archived, select “Finish” to begin archiving your environment. Depending on the size of your SOLIDWORKS Electrical environment, this may take a while.

Please make sure to save the Environment Archive (.tewzip file extension) to a file location you will remember. If you decide to continue creating backups, we suggest that you store these on an external drive for effective data backup and recovery.

Network Server Install or Upgrade

If you intend to have a collaborative environment for the SOLIDWORKS Electrical software, you can follow the steps below to install or upgrade the SQL and SOLIDWORKS Electrical Servers on your server host system. Please note that this must be done on the server host system and should not be installed from the client system unless your system is set up as the SQL Server host and sole user.

You can continue following the steps we provided above for the Individual Install/Upgrade process until you reach the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Options page. You will want to install all features for the server and specify the following:

• Data Location
  • Please work with your IT department to determine a suitable location for the Data Location.
  • This can be set on the C: drive of the server or set elsewhere on another drive local to the server host.
• Collaborative Server
  • Name (you can leave this as “localhost”)
  • Port Number (by default this is “26666” but can be reconfigured as needed for your network firewall)
• SQL Server
  • Name (formatted as [Name][SQL Instance Name], by default this is “localhostTEW_SQLEXPRESS”)
  • Password for ‘tew’ user (by default this is “SQLpwd4ew”)

Network Client Install or Upgrade

The instructions to upgrade a Network Client are nearly identical to the Individual install. The main difference is that you can uncheck the “Collaborative Server” and “Data” options on the Product Selection page, since these will be provided by the network server.

Potential Errors:

Causes

Invalid permissions

• Machine
• SQL

Connection

• Firewalls
• Anti-virus
• Network connection
• Install settings

Password

• Incorrect password
• TEW password length (also seen as 27506)
• Sometimes this error comes up as 27502 (if they have epdm) sometimes it’s 27506 (if there is no epdm but password restrictions are enabled)

Install settings

Causes:

Invalid permissions

• Upgrade from major version
• SQL database owner

Installation settings

• Incorrect options chosen
• Admin image

Causes:

SQL cannot create an instance

• Permissions
• System restart

If you need help with any errors please don’t hesitate to contact us for support.

Please note that as of SOLIDWORKS 2021, SQL Server 2014 is no longer supported for use with SOLIDWORKS Products. You can refer to the System Requirements (https://www.solidworks.com/support/system-requirements) page on the SOLIDWORKS website to verify if your installed version SQL Server is compatible with SOLIDWORKS 2021.

We hope this series has given you an insight on how to successfully install SOLIDWORKS 2021.  Please check back to the CATI Blog as the Technical Team will continue posting new series of articles every month that go further into the details of many of the SOLIDWORKS tools.

• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 1 – Individual Installation (Neil Bucalo)
• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 2 – SOLIDWORKS SolidNetwork License Installation (John Van Engen)
• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 3 – SOLIDWORKS Electrical Installation (Jason Chon)
• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 4 – SOLIDWORKS Composer, SOLIDWORKS Simulation – Motion, Flow, SOLIDWORKS Plastics, and SOLIDWORKS MBD (Bryan Pawlak)
• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 5 – DraftSight and eDrawings (Cami Florence)
• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 6 – SOLIDWORKS PCB (Fred Zobel)
• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide Part 7 – SOLIDWORKS Visualize (James Carlin)
• SOLIDWORKS 2021 Installation Guide – Part 8 SOLIDWORKS CAM (Ronnie Flaugh)

Jason Chon
CATI Technical Support