What you are describing is exactly what NAT appliances are designed to do. $700 - 1000 per network isn't unreasonable for something with a 24V power supply that mounts on a DIN rail.
If you're on a super-restricted budget but have some networking skills, you could use
a $40 travel router running OpenWRT for the same sort of NAT functions. Or put a little extra professionalism into it and buy
a case of Ubiquiti Edgerouter X units and install one at each site.
Or, if your budget is just the aggravation of teaching remote users about networking, enable routing in the Windows 10 Registry Editor, open up TCP Port 44818 in the firewall, and teach your users how to enter static routes at the command line. Or, get adventurous and install
a software NAT on those Windows PC's.
Money is not the issue; we are building tools that are in different clean rooms with the PLCs on different subnets.
One rule is that hardware that will not ship with the tool should generally not be in that clean room.
Everything should be built to POR (Plan of Record), with few exceptions.
No extra power supplies, Din rail, NAT, Router, Switch etc.
Tools are wire gapped when installed on the customer site.
Having extra hardware that does nothing on the final design would require a request for exemption and an engineering justification report to be filed,
and then after waiting months it may or may not be approved.
The mere thought of the **** storm of e-mails that would be created by me sending out such a proposal is just not worth it.
A RS-Linx Gateway software replacement is all that I am looking for.
It is pretty much a software NAT packaged in RS-Linx from what I can tell.
You are pretty on target on the budget goal, teaching/learning about networking.
Say we have 10 programmers on 1 tool.
Current design has 10 VMs with 10 Studio5000 Professional licenses on every tool.
Developers' Remote desktop into their own VM on every tool.
VM access is password controlled and during experiments, access is denied.
This leaves up to 10 Studio 5000 licenses locked in the clean room until the experiment is over or borrowed time expires.
USB ports are disabled except for mouse and keyboard drivers, so you cannot retrieve licenses that way.
Rockwell's paperwork license method is no fun either.
If we get a software NAT to work, we can develop with our PLC lab licenses and not need 10 extra for the clean room.
Along with keeping all 10 extra VMs up to date on firmware, AOIs, EDSs, AOPs
As always, Thanks for the input, I will look into the Windows 10 registry route.