Moving the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Server

This article gives instructions for changing the machine on which the SOLIDWORKS Electrical server components are hosted. Similar steps can apply when moving a standalone installation of Electrical from one computer to another computer regarding archiving the environment and then unarchiving the environment on the new machine.

1. Install the SWE server components on the new server machine, following the server installation guide for your version. Refer to the article, SOLIDWORKS Electrical Installation: Start Here.
2. Have all SWE users stop work and close their client applications.
3. Launch one SWE client application that is connected to the old server machine and run through a full environment archive (File > Archive Environment). Note that this may take several hours depending on the number of projects and size of the library, so should be done overnight to minimize impact to users.
4. Change the Application Settings (Tools > Application Settings) on this client to point to the new server machine. Note that the following fields must be updated with the new information(this is for a network installation of Electrical, this can be skipped for a standalone installation).
   -Collaborative Server > Address: change this to the name or IP address of the new server.
   -Databases > Application Data Folder: change this to the UNC path of the new shared SWE data directory.
   -Databases > Server Name: change this to <name or IP of new server>\<name of new SQL instance> (e.g. NewElecServer\TEW_SQLEXPRESS).
5. Restart the SWE client to allow it to connect to the new server. When prompted, run through the Data Update Wizard to process the default databases.
6. Unarchive the tewzip file created at step 3 (File > Unarchive Environment). This will add all the SWE data from the old server into the new server. Note that this process can also take several hours.
7. Check that the projects from the old server are now showing in the Projects Manager and open one to ensure that the data for those projects is available.
8. Update the Application Settings as per step 4 on all other SWE clients to point them to the new server.