SolidWorks is on board with virtualized CAD systems, recognizing the return-on-investment the method of funneling graphics and computer-power from a remote server to onsite desktops can mean for engineering organizations, said Gary Radburn, director of workstation visualization at Dell Inc.
Radburn spoke at SolidWorks World 2016, held this week in Dallas.
“The technology has come to a point now where we can virtualize graphics for higher graphical workloads or for open graphical support that desktops weren’t delivering,” he said. “SolidWorks is one of the major companies embracing virtualization. The company saw it as a new trend.”
A trend that allows engineers to work from many locations, including from home.
In March 2014, Dell opened its first Workstation Virtualization Center of Excellence in Round Rock, Texas, to provide a physical location and remote access capabilities for customers, channel partners and independent software vendors to evaluate the benefits of running their engineering, oil and gas, media and entertainment and other 2D and 3D applications on a virtual workstation solution, Radburn said.
the SolidWorks CAD application could be housed on Dell servers into which engineers whose companies have access to virtual environment can tap. Engineering companies don’t need to house individual seats of the software on separate workstations, Radburn said.
The method of hosting is roughly equivalent to hosting applications within the cloud environment, though virtual computer hardware platforms, operation systems, storage devices, and network resources, can also be virtualized.
At SolidWorks World, Dell demonstrated 32 individual clients–or computer units–called zero clients that act the “endpoint” at which users access the CAD system.
“But everything running is running from a central server location,” Radburn said. “Processing power and the graphics is housed at the racks.”
Engineering companies choose virtualization because it quickly renders and loads graphics, cutting the time engineers spend waiting for their designs to load and giving them more time to design. It also does away with the need for information technology staff to spend their time patching and upgrading individual workstations. Those changes are made at the server level and automatically rolled out to all clients, Radburn said. In the same way, new SolidWorks users can quickly be brought online and have immediate access to a virtual seat of SolidWorks.
The method also allows for greater collaboration, as engineers working in various locations can show their desktops to others who are also within the virtual environment.
Virtualization has proven quite secure; and users cannot take home their designs on a thumb drive—which is might be lost—as they can with designs that reside on their desktops, Radburn said.
While the Dell servers act as virtual machines, a quick-start tool—the Dell Wyse–is used to set up and deliver those machines, which users access via the client workstations, he added. The tool allows users to be up and running within five minutes within a virtual environment. Up to eight users—depending on their needs and workflow needs, run on one Wyse.
But for all of that, individual workstations and the individual seats of licensed SolidWorks software that reside upon them won’t be going away any time in the future, he said.
“Virtualization doesn’t sound the death knell for workstations,” Radburn said. “I say virtualization where virtualization makes sense. We find engineers like their workstations and like the size of their graphics cards.
“But virtualization allows engineers to be mobile; to work from anywhere, whether it’s home or a coffee shop or a beach,” he added. “They’ve seen people in sales and marketing doing it for a long time and they want to do it too.”
