So, on screen here you see the cloud learning environment setup. You should have booted these
VMs in a lesson - a few lessons ago - and you'll see that there are five of them now.
I'm going to go through what each of them does and what our whole game plan is
for this training class. So first up
over on the right hand side is yeah PIDC: that's a domain controller, we're not going
to talk too much about that but really whenever we need to interact with the domain controller
I'm going to say that we have to tell our IT department to do certain things and we're going
to pretend that they've performed it on the domain controller. So we're not going to talk too much
about that and we're never really going to connect to it, so you don't even need to open that one.
Now the rest of them, let's go through what we've got. So we've got PIINT01 and PIINT02
these are going to be our interface machines and we've got PISRV01 and PISRV02 and these are going
to be our servers. So we've got some pre-installed software here and just quickly going through what
this is so on our PIINT01 and 02 we've got these things called OPC servers already installed
in a production system. Let's see what we've got here. We have something like a DCS maybe,
a distributed control system. Now we need to read from this in some way using using our different
PI System components and generally we need to we need to read from from it. When it's
exposing its data using a certain standard,so this DCS is hooked up to all of our sensors etc
and it's exposing its data to other systems using these things called OPC servers.
So in our case here we're assuming that we have redundant OPC servers,
so two of them with exactly the same data all of the sensors on our plant are exposed
using this OPC standard. So I said the word OPC a lot we're going to hear this a lot throughout the
course, it's an acronym that used to stand for something that doesn't really anymore
but really you can think of it as a way that control systems expose data.
So the PI System can read from lots and lots of different data sources but we're
concentrating on OPC because it's by far the most common data source we read from.
So that's OPC servers, we're going to talk about them a little more
in a little bit. So on the right hand side you'll see PISRV02 has something
pre-installed as well which is a SQL server. So down here so this is a Microsoft SQL server
and it's a prerequisite of PI Asset Framework which is what we're going to install on PISRV02.
All right so what's our game plan
first off the very first thing we're going to install is the PI Data Archive. So over here
we're going to install a PI Data Archive.
This PI Data Archive will store all of the data coming out of all of the sensors on our plant.
The second thing we're going to do is install PI Asset Framework server
on PISRV02. So PI Asset Framework server
we'll install this and then hook it up to our SQL server.
So this SQL server is going to be really the back end to the PI AF service. PI Asset Framework
exposes the data in a hierarchical format to users when they connect.
Whereas PI Data Archive stores all of the sensor data coming out. The
next thing we're going to do is install an interface so over here on PIINT01,
we're going to install the PI Interface for OPC-DA or the OPC interface for short.
Then after we install it, we're going to hook it up to our OPC server
and then hook it up to our Data Archive.
So what this is going to do is every sensor on the DCS or every sensor on the OPC server
has a tag associated with it. You can think of a tag like a data stream,
I'm going to call it probably tags and points and Ι'm going to use those terms interchangeably.
These tags everyone so say it's a temperature sensor on a tank, the OPC server is constantly
going to have a reading for that. The interface is going to read that
and then push the data through to the Data Archive. So every reading, say 20 degrees,
it's going to push that through all the way through to the Data Archive
and the Data Archive is going to save that data so we're going to have a trend for the tag and then
it's going to update it 20 degrees. So after we sort all of this out we're going to sort out user
access to the data. So we've got our single tag here and we've got a user over here. So this user
say they're using they want to access this tank temperature sensor and that they want
the temperature reading and they want to put it in a report, so they're using PI Datalink.
So PI Datalink is an Excel plugin; they put this excel report and they want their
temperature sensor reading the current value to be I don't know let's let's make it go there.
So how does this work? They're going to make a connection to the Data Archive
they're going to say what's the current value of our temperature sensor our temperature tag? PI
Data Archive is going to return to them 20 degrees and then it's going to fill it in in the report.
So after we've set up user access we're going to start setting up redundancy.
So down on our PIINT02 we're going to set up another instance of PI OPC Interface.
We're going to hook that up to our OPC server and then it's going to sit there and wait for
the interface installed on PIINT01 to fail and when it does it's going to take over.
So this is a pretty robust system, we're going to set up
throughout this class, I'm going to go into a lot more detail about
how all these things work and the different options you have for configuration.
So this is a little simplified; in real life you might have firewalls
in all these different places, but as we go through we'll discuss all these different
scenarios and circumstances and then what you can do about it to get things working.