I have a system where the Ignition gateway is on a server on the plant network with a local client by the machine. The client has two NIC cards- one for the plant network and one for the local (192.168.1.x). The PLC also has two IP addresses in this fashion. The customer is looking for a way to have a redundant gateway running on the local client that can connect to the machine PLC over the local 192.168.1.x network in the event that their plant network is down. Is there a way for the redundant gateway setup to work in this case? The issue is that from the primary gateway, the IP address of the PLC will be different from the backup gateway. Will I need to have a second, separate gateway with a manual failover method?
You'll need a separate gateway that you fail over to manually, or some other strategy.
Ignition Redundancy won't work for two reasons:
- the plant network being down doesn't mean anything in terms of redundancy, it won't cause a failover to the backup
- the backup configuration is identical to the primary, so it would still try to connect to the unreachable IP address
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Thank you. The failover could work because if the network is down, the client would not be able to reach the primary gateway and would failover to the backup which is installed locally. I was thinking that I could create two OPC devices that point to the same PLC (one with the plant IP address and one with the local IP address). I would have to create two sets of tags in different folders and then use indirect tag bindings to switch between them. For this to work, I would need to be able to know which gateway is currently the "active" one- the primary or the secondary.