OPC to Rockwell Emulate on VMWare Fusion VM

I have a MacBook running Monterey. I have a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on it running Win10. On the VM I have the Rockwell toolkit loaded. I have code running in Emulate. I want to connect remotely through OPC to the tags in Emulate; in other words, I want an OPC client on another machine to connect to tags in my Emulate code running on the Fusion VM.
- Is this possible?
- Is there a way to test this using a test client; using the IP address of my VM for the host?
- Does it have to be OPC DA, or can OPC UA work?
- Any tricks to make it work?

It should be possible - I've done something similar (though not quite the same) on an Intel mac a few years ago. Here's my thread on the subject which may contain some useful information.

Thanks for the help, still can't connect

I read through the post you referenced. I checked everything on the host. On my client I do not have Rockwell. I have a Win7 virtual amchine on the same MacBook and am trying to get a OPC test client from Integration Objects to see the Emulate tags on my Win10 VM. I can ping the Win10 host, but it must not be able to find the ProgID. The attached bitmaps show the problem. I have tried RSLinx OPC Server, RSLinx Remote OPC Server, RSOPC Gateway, and FactoryTalk Gateway for the OPC server name.

I guess the first step is to make the virtual machine accesible remotely to the other computer, assign the VM a static IP and make sure it can be pinged from yout other computer

patjd**** said:

I read through the post you referenced. I checked everything on the host. On my client I do not have Rockwell. I have a Win7 virtual amchine on the same MacBook and am trying to get a OPC test client from Integration Objects to see the Emulate tags on my Win10 VM. I can ping the Win10 host, but it must not be able to find the ProgID. The attached bitmaps show the problem. I have tried RSLinx OPC Server, RSLinx Remote OPC Server, RSOPC Gateway, and FactoryTalk Gateway for the OPC server name.

Click to expand...

Sorry, this is a little outside my experience - I could try to fumble my way through but I'd be guessing just as much as you at this stage!

QvixoteRoux said:

I guess the first step is to make the virtual machine accesible remotely to the other computer, assign the VM a static IP and make sure it can be pinged from yout other computer

Click to expand...

If you look at the images, you see the Win7 VM pinging the Win10 VM host.

I installed UaExpert on the Win7 VM client and can see the FTLinx server on the Win10 VM host, but cannot connect to Emulate (see image). Any ideas on how to connect?

It worked with UA!

I figured it out!

I needed to use UA instead of DA to connect to the FactoryTalkLinxGateway server.

The attached images show:
- Using the Unified Architecture test client on my Win7 VM, I was able to connect to my Win10 VM and browse tags. I used the Custom Configuration with the IP address of my Win10 VM. Doing so gives me the endpoint for OPC UA configuration
- To confirm it is working, I decided to try it in Ignition. I created an OPC US connection with the endpoint configuration
- It connected!
- Using that connection, the Ignition test client can browse tags.

Therefore, on my MacBook I have to VMs with Emulate on one and OPC client on the other and they are connected through OPC UA

Thanks for posting the follow up! I'm sure this will help plenty of others (and probably me) one day