VMWare and RSNetworx for Devicenet

So I have this interesting problem. I am running a VM from a USB Hard Drive and a VM on my local machine.

Everything appears lovely although I find the VM on the host machine is glitchy at times but that is something I can live with for now.

The problem is I can only get RSNetworx to scan my Devicenet network from the Host machines VM and not from the External Drives VM.

I get the most non informative error message I have ever seen when trying to connect to the network on the external drive VM.

"Failed to show RSWho. There are some unknown reasons, such as; Out of Memory. No enough disk space...etc."

So appart from telling me nothing it even has spelling mistakes.

I am running with 2Gigs of ram on my VMs and anything running on the host machine VM runs fine which also has the same ram allocation.

Has anyone ever come across this error message before?

It is not going to stop me from working but it does require me to run 2 separate VMs. One for PLC and HMI programs and the other just for the RSNetworx.

Once this project is done I plan on reorganizing my VM's to run on a Solid state external HD while in the field and off our automation server while in the office but that will have to wait until the new year.

I just found the error message amusing. Vague and mispelled.

Are you using the 1770-KFD DNet network interface?
What kind of serial port is the host machine using? Physical or USB-to-Serial adapter?
Are you able to connect to the host's serial port from within the external hard drive VM?

The set up I am running is this:

Host machine is a Dell XFR Toughbook with Solidstate HD
VM1 is running on an external convential HD connected via USB.
VM2 is running Locally on the solid state HD

I connect to our PLC network via wireless as our corporate IT guys would have a fit if we connected PLC gear to the CORP network.

VM1 is running and connecting to my 2 PLCs Control and CompactLogix

VM2 is the one that is able to connect and configure the Devicenet network without problems.

It is when I try and use RSnetworx with VM2 that I get the RSWho error.

I also for this project have a Benshaw Mx3 DNet to Modbus card that I configure via ethernet that i also not having any issues.

Both VMs started out the same although VM2 now has some extra EDS files in it but I can't see that as being a problem because the software does not even get online to discover that issue.

It may very well be the way the PLC network is configured that as we need to run routing scripts to connect to the wireless network.
I am leaning more to that idea as I cannot use the ethernet driver that browses the network I have to use the driver that you have to input the device IP addresses in order to have RSLinx see the device.

My new partner was in IT for 25 years so once he is done with his project we may have to sit down and run some tests and see where the problem lies.

DeviceNet and RSNetworx for DeviceNet have been around for quite some time (thirty years or so) and they are pretty much legacy communications (Serial Fieldbus).
Probably the VM's Network Adapter trying to acommodate both EtherNet/IP and RSNetworx for DeviceNet communications is the culprit.
Do you have both VMs's Network Adapters configured identically?
I have a VMware Workstation with a "bridged" Network Adapter running Online RSL5K and RSNetworx without any issues, however the host is networked within the Logix bridge's subnet.

I will have to get back to you on the Network settings. In the next little bit I am going to be swapping my current Hard drive to a larger one and the current one will become my external.
Once I do this I will have some time to run further tests and know for sure.

It has been awhile but I have discovered the cause and solution to the posted problem.

It has nothing to do with the VMs but with an Eaton EDs file.

I have another laptop that had a working copy of RSNetworks. Started commissioning my job and found that I was missing an EDs. Searched the net and found a file that fit the device that I was using.

Everything was good for about 2 hours of installing the EDS file and I was able to connect to the device.

I needed to switch projects so when I did and tried to reconnect to the DNET I received that RSWho Failed... error.

There is a tech note on Rockwells site that mention that certain Eaton EDS files can corrupt the EDS data base and cause the error and inability to connect to the netwok.

Once I removed the offending EDS file/s I was able to reconnect to the network without a problem.

I can't connect to the one device as of yet but it is a spare MCC bucket so I will comission the job first then go back to configure it last.

Just an update.


Have a god one

Dallin said:

It has been awhile but I have discovered the cause and solution to the posted problem....

Click to expand...

Thanks for posting the solution! Always handy when people do a followup on their problem especially if they had to find a solution.