Best Practices for management of multiple Ignition Gateways

Ignition
1

Hello Everyone,

We have a customer that has a full-fledged Ignition Gateway as well as two Ignition Edge gateways that are used in the place of a Magelis HMI’s. While I like the idea of having a full fledged SCADA to develop HMI applications on, I am worried that as more of these Edge gateways get commissioned at this site it will become a nightmare to maintain.

So here is my question. What are the best practices for maintaining multiple Ignition Gateways when the full-fledged Gateway needs to contain all of the same screens and information that the Edge gateway’s have?

Here is the options I have weighed:

  1. Let a client retarget from the main SCADA to the edge gateway to view its screens and therefore the tags and screens are in separate gateways. (The con of this is only one client can be retargeted at a time)

  2. Develop the application in the edge gateway and then take all of the resources (windows and tags) and copy them to the main SCADA. (The con is now I have to mange keeping these two projects in sync with each other)

  3. Let the edge gateway point to the main SCADA (perhaps a separate project just for the edge screens), therefore keeping all of the information in the main SCADA. (The con is I would lose my screens if the network faulted for some reason, so I must consider copying that project into the Edge gateway so I can have local fallback)

Sorry for the extra long post.
And thank you in advance for the feedback.

2

This is exactly the problem we developed the Enterprise Administration Module for; you can set up scheduled tasks to send resources or entire projects between gateways over the gateway area network.

3

Will this work if the gateway versions are different?

4

Yes, EAM works across gateway versions. You’ll probably want them all to at least be 7.9, (though that’s not strictly necessary), and as of 7.9…2? you can even use EAM to remotely upgrade a gateway.

5

Would you suggest that the gateways be on the same major version?
For example, the controller be ignition 8 and agents be ignition 7, would that work?

6

Certain tasks, especially project resource related tasks, will not/cannot work across major versions. You will still get pretty good compatibility if you’re on latest 7.9.x and 8.X versions, but you’re generally going to have the best experience if they’re all on the same major version.