Thank you for asking, a good question indeed! The Gateway is not only capable of doing OPC COM DA but can also aggregate multiple TwinCAT OPC UA Servers through ONE OPC UA port. There can be multiple use cases why you want to do that. 1. Let's assume that you have more than one TwinCAT OPC UA Server that you want to expose through a NAT/Firewall device. If you want to access all servers through the NAT/Firewall device, you would have to open multiple network ports. If you aggregate the servers through the Gateway, only one port is required. 2. Same assumption but without a NAT/Firewall device between the client and the server. In that case you may want to reduce maintenance effort when configuring OPC UA client/server certificate trust relationships. Every client needs to trust the server certificate and vice versa. If you aggregate all the servers through the Gateway and having the client connecting to the Gateway instead of every server individually, you reduce trust relationships. Depending on your network architecture, you could run a non-secure communication between the Gateway and the Servers (e.g. using the None/None endpoint) and having secure communication only between the client and the Gateway. So in the end, the Gateway can play its advantages especially if you have more than one OPC UA Server in your network that you may want to aggregate. I hope that answers your question.
We have separate video tutorials for the different components of our TF6100 OPC UA product (client, server, gateway, …). The Gateway doesn’t need to be configured via Visual Studio. Instead, you can use a standalone configuration tool to configure the different aspects of the Gateway. The reason is that the Gateway is often installed on devices, e.g. an edge device, where no Visual Studio is available. Should you have further questions, our support team will be happy to assist.
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What are the benefits of using the gateway when you can connect to the server directly as well? Besides using opc COM. Does it have more capabilities?
Thank you for asking, a good question indeed! The Gateway is not only capable of doing OPC COM DA but can also aggregate multiple TwinCAT OPC UA Servers through ONE OPC UA port. There can be multiple use cases why you want to do that.
1. Let's assume that you have more than one TwinCAT OPC UA Server that you want to expose through a NAT/Firewall device. If you want to access all servers through the NAT/Firewall device, you would have to open multiple network ports. If you aggregate the servers through the Gateway, only one port is required.
2. Same assumption but without a NAT/Firewall device between the client and the server. In that case you may want to reduce maintenance effort when configuring OPC UA client/server certificate trust relationships. Every client needs to trust the server certificate and vice versa. If you aggregate all the servers through the Gateway and having the client connecting to the Gateway instead of every server individually, you reduce trust relationships. Depending on your network architecture, you could run a non-secure communication between the Gateway and the Servers (e.g. using the None/None endpoint) and having secure communication only between the client and the Gateway.
So in the end, the Gateway can play its advantages especially if you have more than one OPC UA Server in your network that you may want to aggregate. I hope that answers your question.
No mention of a TwinCAT OPC UA project. Is no longer needed or this video just didn't go into this part of the set up?
We have separate video tutorials for the different components of our TF6100 OPC UA product (client, server, gateway, …). The Gateway doesn’t need to be configured via Visual Studio. Instead, you can use a standalone configuration tool to configure the different aspects of the Gateway. The reason is that the Gateway is often installed on devices, e.g. an edge device, where no Visual Studio is available. Should you have further questions, our support team will be happy to assist.