Aveva Plant SCADA Deployments Limits

[johnatan]

Hi,

Looking to find the known limits of Aveva Plant SCADA Deployment / Citect SCADA 2018 R2:

1. Maximum number of deployment clients per deployment server?

2. Maximum number of versions per deployment?

Other questions: 

1. Any documentation detailing best practices for backing up the deployment server database and deployment version files in the event of disaster recovery. 

2. When deploying a version to a deployment client, is the transfer of the deployment version files encrypted end-to-end? 

Thanks in advance.

Johnatan Feuillye

[Kien_Mac]

Hi Johnatan,

I understand you posted this enquiry in our support cases as well. We have replied to that directly. However, I will post that content here for the wider forum users and add extra notes.

1) There is no a hard limit to the number of deployment clients that a deployment server can handle. It is a function of time, size and bandwidth. It is worth consideration to segment your deployment strategy so the system has time to update and swap over to not compromise the runtime operations.

Which is the number that you have in mind?

2) Again, you can go as much as you want but you need to take into consideration the HDD space that each version takes on the PC. There is a good practice to keep not more than 100 versions on the deployment server. it is best to have some method of change management for overall project governance.

3) Best practice is not to back up the deployment versions, but to create a backup of the project (eg: every day). Simple as it is, you normally develop in your engineering station and to recover you will just need the project, restore, recreate the version, and deploy to all (5 mins job). Then it is up to you if you want to save and backup the versions of the deployment. I don't fully see the need to do it, but I may not have the full vision of this. You normally keep different versions for other minor changes during the days/week and you store them on the deployment server to easily swap between them.

4) Yes, it is encrypted and 2018R2 (v.8.2) uses TLS 1.2 at minimum. It has always been encrypted since the introduction of this version in 2016. With 2018R2 we have delegated the creation of the certificates to the System Management Server process while in the past the deployment plugin created the certificate.

Hope this covers your questions.