Install Products Using an Installation Image

You can download products from Empower into an installation image and then use that image to install products on one or more machines. When you install from the image, you can choose to install only the subset of products you want on each machine. You might use this method in these cases:

When machines on which you want to install cannot go outside your corporate firewall (that is, cannot connect to Empower).

You want to store a specific release of each product so you can install the same product releases on multiple machines over time. Empower provides only the latest releases of products, so the release of a product that is available now might be replaced by a later release in the future. An installation image always contains the releases of the products that you downloaded into it from Empower.

You want to install some or all of the same products on multiple machines, and you want to avoid the time required to download from Empower.

You create an image by running the Software AG Installer, connecting to Empower, and selecting products to download into the image. You can create an image for any operating system from any operating system; for example, you can create an image for a Solaris system from a Windows system. When you create an image, therefore, the installer must ignore the local machine. This means that:

The installer cannot automatically manage dependencies for the products you select, because it does not know which products are already installed in the target installation directories. Instead, the installer lists required products, but you must use your knowledge of the target installation directories to decide whether to include them in the image. The installer will look for the required products in the target installation directory and the image when you install from the image on each target machine. If the required products are in neither location, the installer will not be able to continue.

The installer does not ask for machine-specific information such as target installation directory or product port values. You will provide the machine-specific information when you install from the image on each target machine.

The installer does not request product-specific information such as product port values, license files, and database connection parameters during image creation. You will provide product-specific information when you install from the image on each target machine.

The installer saves images as zip files. Each zip file includes an HTML file named ImageContents.html that you can open to see the contents of the image.