Vault Cloning Optimization
Steps to configure a production and test Windchill systems to effectively use the shared vaults.
Setting up shared vault configuration on the Test system
1. Clone the Windchill TEST and PROD systems that will share the production vault.
2. After cloning, all hosts and sites configured on the PROD system are copied to the TEST system.
a. Remove hosts not applicable to the TEST system.
b. Remove unnecessary replica sites.
3. Follow these steps on the TEST system for all shared vaults:
a. Mark the physical folders, Azure blobs, or AWS S3 storage corresponding to the vault as read-only at the OS level, Blob level, or AWS S3, respectively, for the TEST system. This will prevent the TEST system from writing or deleting any content from the shared vault. The PROD system will have a read-write access to the shared vault.
b. Mark the shared vault as read-only from the Vault Configuration UI on TEST system. This will prevent the TEST system from uploading any content to the shared vault.
c. On the main site, set the Windchill property wt.fv.sharedVaults={vaultName} on the TEST system. If multiple vaults are shared, use comma “,” as a separator for vault names. This property disables the background operations such as revaulting or removing unreferenced files, so that the content is not deleted from the shared vault.
4. Set up alternate vaults to accept the content. The shared vault is read-only and will not accept content from the test system.
5. Make sure that ForceContentToVault is set to False. To have one read-only master vault and one read-write master vault, the property must be false.
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As mentioned in 3.a above, even though setting the property and marking the shared vault as read-only in Windchill will prevent data movement from the shared vault, it is recommended to mark the physical vault locations like Azure blobs, file-based folders, or AWS S3 as read-only from the test system.
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Setting up the shared vault configuration on the PROD system
As the PROD system has read-write access to the shared vault, it accepts new content from the PROD system. However, if the content from the shared vault is deleted due to background operations like removing unreferenced files or revaulting on the PROD system, the test system also loses the data. To avoid data loss on the test system, it is suggested to set the following property on the main site on the PROD system:
wt.fv.sharedVaults={sharedVaultName}
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If the vault configured on the Windchill system is shared with other Windchill systems, for example, test and production Windchill systems, the property wt.fv.sharedVaults is set with comma-separated list of main vault names (not applicable for cache vaults and replica vaults) on the main site, but it is not required on the replica site. If this property is set, the below operations are not performed on the vault to avoid data inconsistency between the Windchill systems that share the vault:
• Removing unreferenced files
• Revaulting the content from the vault to other vaults
• Mount validation if the vault is also marked as read-only
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