MSIX Installation Technology for AVEVA Products

AVEVA is moving to the Microsoft installation technology MSIX which will gradually be adopted across AVEVA’s product suite.

MSIX offers the following benefits:

• Much improved speed of product deployment.

• Every package, even patches, are a complete install (no dependency on base releases).

• When installed the software is an immutable image that is not subject to modification.

• The install is personal to the user and not the machine.

• Silent install available through PowerShell.

• Option for machine wide provision with silent install using PowerShell.

More broadly, MSIX has implications both in terms of deployment and in terms of product usage going forward.

When MSIX installs a product, the installed directory is not accessible or visible on the disk to users. This is intentional, the completed install is a stable, immutable image. This change of visibility has the following significant impacts on AVEVA’s applications:

• Environment variable files are no longer accessible in the installed directory.

• The product executables required for batch operations are no longer visible.

• Configuration files for global and shared services are no longer accessible in the installed directory. For more information, see Updated Location for Configuration Files.

As a result, AVEVA are providing a new approach to running batches and new locations for configuration and environment files outside of the installed directory.

It is also worth noting that MSIX does not support multiple versions of the same product being installed at once. There is an expectation that one version of each application will be installed at a time.

Lastly, by default, MSIX installs for the individual user doing the install, not at machine level for all users. There are methods to manipulate the install such that it does deploy for all users. By default, products deploy to the individual user account.