Our company is one of the leading providers of industrial and building automation solutions in South eastern Europe, with over fourteen years of experience in automation, control and supervisory in pharmaceutical industry.
Currently we are involved in modernisation of automation system of multi-purpose pharmaceutical synthesis. One of our tasks is to implement a system for recording, archiving and retrieving a large quantities of process data. For that specialised task we are using GE Fanuc iHistorian application. iHistorian is copy protected by USB dongle.
Hence we need to ensure very high availability of our systems, especially in pharmaceutical industry, we are using two physical servers running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise each in a role of Hyper-V server virtualization host. To ensure failover we are using Microsoft Clustering Technologies.
Inside Hyper-V virtual machine (running Microsoft Windows Server 2003) we've installed GE Fanuc iHistorian. At this point we came across a problem where USB over Network software was the solution, namely Hyper-V virtual machine does not support access to USB ports on Hyper-V host physical machines, but iHistorian needs access to the USB port on physical machines because of USB protection dongles. Also, if one physical machine falls out, iHistorian need access to the USB dongle on another physical server.
We've found FabulaTech USB over Network on the internet, installed one USB over Network Server on each physical machine and USB over Network Client on iHistorian virtual machine - and it works smoothly!
Yours sincerely,Roland Jurcan.