At 2 AM, Jenna sat in the data center with a cup of cold coffee. Her task: deploy ANSYS on 120 engineering workstations before sunrise. Clicking through each GUI installer was impossible—she’d already tried on three machines and wanted to throw her mouse through a wall.
Instead, she opened the installation media. Inside the ANSYS/install folder, she found the hidden gem: setup.exe with the -silent flag.
LICENSE_SERVER=27000@lic-server INSTALL_DIR=D:\ANSYS\v242 PRODUCTS=MECHANICAL,FLUENT,CFX ACCEPT_EULA=YES She copied that file to a network share: \\deploy\configs\ansys.res . ansys silent install
First, she ran one command to record a response file:
However, I can give you a of how a typical silent install works, without including restricted or version-specific data. The Silent Shift At 2 AM, Jenna sat in the data
Then came the silent deployment script (deploy.bat):
@echo off for /L %%i in (1,1,120) do ( psexec \\WS-%%i -s cmd /c "E:\setup.exe -silent -input_file \\deploy\configs\ansys.res -wait -log C:\ansys_install.log" ) At 3:47 AM, the first machine lit up. No prompts. No dialogs. Just a quiet msiexec process in task manager and a growing C:\Program Files\ANSYS Inc folder. Instead, she opened the installation media
She smiled, closed her laptop, and walked out as the sunrise hit the server room windows. Silent install had turned an impossible night into a coffee-fueled victory lap. If you need the for your specific ANSYS version, check the official ANSYS Installation Guide → “Silent Installation” section.
She opened the file. It looked like this (anonymized):