During installation, the PTC Solution Installer (PSI) can use a common staging area where all CD images have previously been downloaded. This is the recommended installation method, avoiding the need to switch CDs in the drive during installation. A staging area can be defined on a location directly on the local machine or use a mapped network drive.

After a staging area has been selected, the various software CD images can be downloaded to support the Windchill installation. For Windows platforms, the administrator should download the ZIP file version of the installation. Depending on the maintenance build you are installing, the core Windchill components of the major release need to be downloaded as well as any maintenance build CD images.

In a multi-tier installation, first you need to execute PSI on the database server, and then execute it on the application server. To accomplish this, you must either create a staging area on each server machine, or use a network drive mapped to each machine with read and write permissions for both.

The following table lists the Windchill base CD images, along with some solution options, needed to execute PSI. For a multi-tier installation, the database server requires two CD images as shown.