Workflow for creating Volume License Installer and publish as NI Package

[Oli_Wachno]

Hi there,

I am planning on creating different installation sets for NI Software using the VLM and distributing them via NI Package Feed.

From what I have learned the workflow for LabVIEW is:

• Download the ISO image (36GB at the time of writing) from ni.com
• Create a customized installer using Volume License Manager
• Create an NI Package for the customized installer
• Reference this new package to a feed 

Have I missed anything?

Cheers

Oli

[Oli_Wachno]

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Create a customized installer using Volume License Manager

Create an NI Package for the customized installer

according to the links above, I have created an installer, yet there are some issues left:

1.  when starting the installer, the user needs to agree to the installation of additional packages
2. according to this document, silent install  (which I assume would just install those recommended packages) is only possible using command line?

[cflory]

There is a known issue currently within VLM where VLI's, that are created with VLM, use outdated Package Manager command-line commands for silent installations. Unfortunately this is not something that can be changed without re-writing some of the code within VLM, which means that this fix for the issue will not be available until a future release of VLM. Current released version of VLM, as of this post, is 3.3. A possible workaround, for the time-being, is to create a batch script that calls NILM's command line "/addservers" command to add the VLM server to the client's NILM server list (for the volume licensing), then copy the offline package installer to the client machine and run it's silent installation directly, using the proper (i.e. non-deprecated) silent installation commands. Be aware that this work around, without using interactive mode, will not work successfully if there are any missing dependencies. You can run the interactive installation up-front to see if there are any missing dependencies that need to be added to the script. Also be aware that the volume licensing for the packages might require pre-emptive manually adding the user and computer entries to the appropriate group (for Managed Concurrent licenses) or the license(s) itself (for Managed Non-Concurrent licenses). Non-Managed Concurrent licenses do not need explicit permissions or relevant user/computer entries, as it is a first-come-first-served license type.