Requirements and installation

Requirements

An appropriate License for distributed systems has to exist.
Different WinCC OA versions may be installed on all systems.
The configuration of the languages (it is defined when creating the project) on all systems has to match.
The user permissions are evaluated in the network of a distributed system. On this account it is recommended to create the same WinCC OA users with the same rights on every system.

CAUTION:

The configured languages and the order of languages must match inside a distributed system.

ISO and UTF8 combination is possible if the previous requirement is fulfilled.

Note:

It is supported to mix 32-bit and 64-bit in distributed systems. For example a 32-bit WinCC OA system can be connected to a 64-bit WinCC OA system. Please also refer to software-requirements.
Note the restriction for the following connect and query functions regarding the usage with multiple systems: dpConnect(), dpQuery(), dpQueryConnectAll(), dpQueryConnectSingle(), isAnswer() as well as isRefresh().
The usage of the Multiplexing Proxy for distributed systems on the same machine is not supported.

CAUTION: To establish a connection to projects of version 3.15 or older, it is required to update the supported cipher suites by setting the config entry [all sections] cipherSuiteList within your old project, to also allow the currently used cipher suites of your new project, e.g.:


[general]
cipherSuiteList = "TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384,TLS_CHACHA20_POLY1305_SHA256,TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,AES256-SHA256,AES256-SHA"

Requirements for Distributed Systems using different Languages (Multilingualism)

- The projects of a distributed system must use the same configured languages in the same order. The encoding (ISO, UTF8) can be different if a connection between a system running 3.16 (or higher) and a system running 3.15 (or lower) shall be made.

Note: The encoding is automatically detected for systems running version 3.14 or 3.15. For a system running the version 3.13 (or a lower version), the encoding of the distributed systems must be configured. Two encodings can be used for the character encoding: "UTF8" or "ISO". The encoding must be entered as the third parameter of the config entry [dist] distPeer. If the parameter is NOT used and the remote system is using version 3.13 or lower, the encoding of the local system (3.16, UTF8) is used.

If a connection between two systems running different encodings (UTF8 in 3.16, ISO in 3.15 or lower) shall be made, the [dist] distPeer entry must be defined in the system running 3.16 or higher to be able to define the encoding for the remote system by using the distPeer entry. When the different encoding is not detected automatically or not defined by using the distPeer entry, character conversion issues for multi-language texts may arise.

Note: A string (not a multi-language string) cannot be converted from ISO to UTF8 and vice versa as a string has no encoding. If a string contains characters, which are not part of the ISO standard character set (95 ASCII characters), they will not be displayed correctly in a remote system.

Installation

A normal installation of WinCC OA version 3.12 or higher is sufficient for using distributed systems. See chapter Installation for more information on installing WinCC OA. The configuration of a distributed system with WinCC OA is described in detail in the chapter Creating a distributed system.