With the TIA Portal V20 version that you can download and try from the link, the redundancy option for WinCC Unified has already been released... so, it’s time to test its functionality ;-)
Before starting, you should know the following considerations:
I will create the basic steps and specify the details of interest :-)
We create a new project, or on the one we are working on, and add a new device: SIMATIC WinCC Unified PC
When adding this device, SIMATIC PC Station is automatically added.
In its properties, we will define who will be our main server
The next thing we need is our network card, we add it to our chassis according to the hardware we have.
Now we assign the IP address and we have configured the necessary hardware.
The next step is to configure the properties of WinCC Unified PC RT
The configuration is as easy as checking the Enable redundancy checkbox and defining the redundant server. With these steps, redundancy is already configured.
However, for now, a requirement is that the historical data is stored in SQL Server, instead of SQL Lite, so we make that configuration.
At this step, we will develop our project, the only thing I have configured are the system variables of redundancy on a screen, to test what redundancy is really about.
To avoid making the article too lengthy, we assume that we have two servers, with the names we have seen, where it has been installed:
- WinCC Unified PC Runtime V20 + SR1
- WinCC Unified DB Storage V20
And it has been configured:
- WinCC Unified Certificate Manager (Generate the certificates that we will then install on the clients)
- WinCC Unified Configuration
- Synchronization between the two servers.
And from our engineering station with TIA Portal, we can check that we have both servers available.
We transfer to our main server.
Here are the options we can configure when making the transfer.
And if you are wondering...
How is it transferred to the secondary server?
Well, look at the following image, if both servers are available, you will be able to select it
And now we have both servers running
At this point, we just need to connect from a client and perform the tests, disable one server, disable the other, and check its operation.
And at this point, we will see what licenses we will need, except the first one which is common for both servers, the rest has to be for each of the servers, just like in traditional WinCC
- WinCC Unified Redundancy
- WinCC Unified Runtime (RT)
- WinCC Unified Database Storage
- WinCC Unified number Clients
- (Optional) WinCC Unified Logging Tags
- (Optional) WinCC Unified Audit
- (Optional) WinCC Unified Parameter Control
Here is a short video and note that the user, when switching servers, has to log in again.
The next test will be to configure UMC User Management Component, a requirement to have this functionality operational
