Ignition Production Environment

Ignition
,
1

Hello everyone,
I have been working with Ignition (perspective) for a while and it now time to move my projects to a production environment. This will be the first time I am interacting with this environment and would greatly appreciate guidance of steps for moving a design to production.
The process of pushing an Ignition project to production
Detailed guidance would be greatly appreciated as this is my first time trying it out.

2

Not sure what you're expecting to hear from us.

But like any project you're comissioning, it pays to do a few things you'd do on any SCADA project:

  • Draw up a testing plan, make sure all your buttons work as expected with relevant machinery, including alarming, trending, etc. Make sure this plan is followed and signed off at the end of the FAT.
  • Make sure security is working correctly, nothing worse than adding a new SCADA and someone accidentally does something silly they shouldn't have been able to do, like change a setpoint or run some machinery becuase your security zoning is incorrect.
  • Check the networking to your database, clients, PLCs. Good to also test your redundancy fail over on site at least once if used.
  • Write a manual on how to use your SCADA, get this checked by the client, signed off, and released.
3

My main issue is how to deploy my projects (how to make them live and accessible for other devices, not only the local host).
What are the steps involved in deploying an Ignition perspective project?
Thanks.

4

Oh, just install Ignition, and connect using the IP address on the client side. Using a browser or Perspective Workstation. No different to your testing

5

http://localhost:8088/data/perspective/client/system_control/
This is a sample link for the session for an ignition perspective project I have been working on.
How to I deploy the project so it can be accessible by clients anywhere.

6

Find your IP address and replace localhost with that IP. If the PC can ping that IP then no issues.

7

Sounds like you have your development gateway installed in your local workstation or laptop. Don't do that--it makes the chance of screwing your later network connections much higher.

If possible, use separate hardware for your gateway and another for your database. Connect to your gateway, with both browser, and designer, from your workstation. That will ensure that the gateway is properly configured for the necessary external connections.

Try to use a proper DNS system for all connections, including from your workstation. Then, deployment simply requires updating the production network's DNS to have these names with their new IP addresses.

If you cannot do the above with real hardware and an external DNS, use virtual machines in your workstation to mimic it.

Absolutely do this before going to production.

8

Thank alot.
Is there a resource that you can share that I can use as a guide for doing the setups. I'll greatly appreciate.

9

I use Virt-Manager on Linux as my hypervisor manager for local virtual machines (which then uses libvirt and QEMU's KVM layer). I supplement that with somewhat exotic in-workstation and trunked VLANs using OpenVSwitch.

If your workstation is Windows, you'll need to use something else, and I'll let others make such recommendations.

1 Like