OEM Licensing

[DFrome]

How does OEM licensing work exactly?

Do we take the "demo" and just install it and bundle in the license key? or are we given a specific OEM build for our Product?

We want to programmatically be able to install the UA Gateway on our customers machines when they install our product.

Thanks,

Daniel

[Support Team]

Hello Daniel,

it is not a special build, but you must install it differently. For the OEM you can (slightly) customize the installation procedure of the UaGateway. You can integrate the UaGateway-Setup within you product setup. E.g. call "silently" the UaGateway-Setup and pass on the parameters as needed. The encapsulation, or frame setup, will include the OEM-license and OEM pre-configuration (e.g. directly connect to your DA Server) plus other information regarding e.g. UA certificates, etc. Hence UaGateway will just run our of the box without any further action required by your end customer.

The UaGateway-Setup needs only one (interactive) information when being installed, the user/pwd of the context the UaGateway should run with (Windows Service). You could either ask this in your frame-setup and pass it along as command line parameter to our "silent" UaGateway-Setup, or you just don't set it, but than UaGateway will ask for it on initial configuration directly after UaGateway-Setup (forced start of Admin-Dialog). This depends on how "silent" you want the setup to be.

Typically within your frame setup you would make a check box "install UaGateway yes/no" plus optionally two text boxes asking "launshing User/Pwd".

[DFrome]

Thank you for the information.

As far as OEM versus Standard.

We have been using the demo applcation, and it works extremely well. We do have some concerns before we purchase the licensing though.

In the OEM documentation it looks like you can only have a single DA/UA connection. While in the demo/standard, you can concentrate (or group) many DA/UA servers together.

in our application we have a UA Server, in which we map DA/UA tags from other servers to a single Endpoint (or UA Server). We were able to have multiple remote DA servers, and multiple UA servers connected. We used your SDK to build our UA server and again, it works extremely well. In addition in the Demo you can point a DA client/connector to the UA Gateway and be able to pull DA items/values (via aliasing).

In the OEM is this not possible? It looks while the administrator page is a little different, I did not see any documentation that says the configuration page exists in the OEM version. We need to be able to concentrate many UA/DA servers at the gateway. The only interaction is our UA Server.

In terms of data flow it looks like this DA/UA > Gateway > our UA Server or DA Client > Gateway > UA Server > DA Server

So can oem handle this, or is that a standard run time option only?

It would appear that the OEM licensing does not offer the concentration, only a single DA (must be local as well) and UA endpoint.

[Support Team]

Hello Daniel,

the OEM-UaGateway will only be able to connect to "licensed" DA-Servers (each OEM-license is bound to one OEM-Server). In cotrast to that the regular-UaGateway is bound to the machine (PC) where it is installed on, but can connect to multiple different DA-Servers. However we do not recommend to connect "remotely" to underlying DA-Servers, in most cases this does not work because of DCOM security settings. Over the network you should always use UA connections only.

So your impression is correct, with the regular-UaGateway you can "aggregate" multiple DA-Servers that reside on one PC and make them available via secure UaGateway UA Server. The OEM-UaGateway instead is intended for companies having a legacy DA-Server (the OEM's Server) or DA-Client product and want to make it available through UA (use UaGateway as UA-Wrapper). Second use case is for companies already having integrated a modern UA Server into their product, but in the field are still confronted with "old" DA Clients that need to connect, hence the OEM-UaGateway will act as proxy for this one particular UA Server (the OEM's Server) and make it available through classic DA-Server.

[DFrome]

So, in our use case(s).

1) We have a DA Server that we use to "map" data (using a UA Mapping Utility we have developed) into our UA Server. That would work assuming DCOM is set up appropriately. E.g. Remote DA to OPC UA
2) We have multiple UA Servers we can use to concentrate the data, e.g. Remote UA Server > Concentrate to the Gateway
3) We have DA clients that need to connect to the UA Gateway in order to pull data from our UA Server (through the Gateway). For example using Quick Client/Matrikon Explorer pointing to UnifiedAutomation.Gateway.1 as the OPC Server.

Would all those combinations work with an OEM License? If not which ones would work, and secondly with a Standard License, I'm fairly certain all these work work since it works great in the demo.

The reason for the questions is the difference in cost so we want to make sure we can accomplish all the use cases above.

Thanks again for your input.

[DFrome]

Is there a "demo" OEM version with the same time limit?

[DFrome]

And does the OEM version have a configuration where you select what DA servers you want to aggregate? I think that is the most confusing part of the documentation. It is unclear that you configure anything in the OEM version, other than the tabs in the Administer screen.

[Support Team]

Hello Daniel,

in the OEM-License concept, for each DA Server you want to configure you need a separate OEM-License (multiple installations, but only one underlying Server). Hence the "OEM-License" makes most sense when having "one" (or very few) underlying servers. With the regular Runtime-License you can configure aggregation with multiple servers (multiple underlying Servers, but only one installation).

The OEM-Setup hides the tabs in the admin-dialog that are "useless" for the related use case. The OEM-Setup pre-configures the "local connection" to the one or two underlying DA Servers (because that is the only one (or two) Servers that can be connected anyway, due to the OEM-License). Such connections are always "local" COM-DA connections but not remote to avoid DCOM (over the network we always speak UA)

Regarding your use cases:
1) you would need one OEM-License for the one DA-Server (license is bound to the ProgID of that DA Server). OEM-Setup will have that one DA Server "pre-configured" (local connection) the UaGateway must be installed on the same box with the DA Server. (no admin tab needed to configure)

2) you would need multiple OEM Licenses for the different UA Servers you want to aggregate. Aggregation is not a typical wrapper/proxy use case as fot the DA-UA legacy connectivity the "OEM" license is designed for.

3) you would need one OEM License for the one (your) UA Server. However the DA Clients should not connect remotely to the UnifiedAutomation.UaGateway.1, but locally. Hence you should install the UaGateway on each box (multiple installations) but connect such DA Clients "locally" to avoid DCOM and running UA over the wire.

For the use case 1 and 3 you would need two OEM-Licenses, however for use case 2 the OEM-Licenses concept will become quite expensive depending on how many different UA Servers you want to aggregate.

With the "regular" Runtime-License all three use cases will work, but you need license "per installation".