Redundancy using Virtualization - Licence?

Ignition
1

Hello all,

A client of mine is about to migrate is old SCADA system to Ignition and asked me a question I could not answer about Redundancy.
The idea is to have Ignition Gateway running within a virtual machine (Let us call is “Master”). The virtual machine is daily snapshot on another computer (Let us call it “Backup”).
Whenever the “Master” fails, my client would like to manually activate the Gateway by launching the snapshot on the “Backup”.
As far as I know, all should go fine in this operation but there is a point about the licence. Indeed, it has been activated in the Master Virtual machine. Will it still be activated in the Backup ? (The virtual machine files are the same, only the computer changes)

Thank you for your enlightenment.

Regards.

2

An Ignition license is tied to a few hardware details of the machine it was activated for. If these details are not the same on the backup machine it will not be licensed.

3

So, if I understand well, it won’t work, even if virtualized ?

In that case, which kind of licence may fit this need ?

4

Unless you can virtualize hardware details like inode number and hard drive serial number across two different computers it won’t work.

You might ask your sales rep about a hardware licensing key. When they do the manual failover they can also move the key to the other machine.

5

I can’t see why it shouldn’t work as the VM details do not change. The software on the VM does not use hardware details from the hypervisor for licencing. It should also work with live migrations as you wouldn’t need to do a manual changeover as with a hardware key.

I don’t have a system here to test it on but I’m guessing it should work fine. Just the same as any software on a VM doesn’t lose it’s licencing when migrated.

Mike

6

Mike,

It is just as Kevin said, the Ignition license is bound to the hardware of the first VM

So if you move the VM snapshot to a new physical piece of hardware the license is going to see a hardware change and place the gateway in a 7 day emergency activation mode.

7

Sorry to bump an old topic, but in the event of what you say here Greg, can’t you then just unlink the activation from the original hardware and tie it to the new hardware within that 7 day period?

8

No, if it goes into emergency state you must contact IA support to get it reset.

9

Yeah, that’s what I’m referring to. As in, just get it reset and then tie it to the new hardware during the emergency activation period.

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