How to connect and provision multiple Edge device in EflowVm in IOT Central

Question

Hi Team,

I have installed IoT Edge for Linux on Windows Azure VM and provisioned one device and now when I am creating a new device and trying to provision the new device and it is overwriting the previous device.

Is there any way to provision multiple device in the same EflowVm without overwriting the previous device in IOT Central?

I am using IOT Central for Edge Devices.

Answer 1

Hello @SaurabhShukla ,
Unfortunately, OPC Publisher on IoT Edge supports only acting as a protocol translation gateway. That means, the device id of the IoT Edge device OPC Publisher is running on will be used as originator of all downstream OPC messages and you need to find a separate way to distinguish between downstream PLC1, PLC2, PLC3 as data sources, e.g., via tag structure. This corresponds to the righthand side visualization in the image below:

To achieve individual device ids per PLC, you can either deploy multiple IoT Edge-OpcPublisher instances on individual (virtual) machines what comes with some overhead and is mainly configuration. Alternatively, you can implement the identity translation gateway pattern as described in Azure IoT Edge Identity Translation Lite: Sample. Within the identity translation pattern, a custom module will consume the OpcPublisher data stream and create individual connections to IoT Hub with individual device ids for each downstream PLC. This requires custom coding, and I haven't tested it with IoT Central. Thus, currently there is no easy option to achieve your scenario and I would recommend finding a workaround.

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Answer 2

@SaurabhShukla

when I am creating a new device and trying to provision the new device and it is overwriting the previous device.

How exactly are you adding the devices? Are you adding the device through any template?

Is there any way to provision multiple device in the same EflowVm without overwriting the previous device in IOT Central?

I suggest you check the documentation Create and provision IoT Edge for Linux on Windows devices at scale using symmetric keys

Also, you can create an enrollment to provision one or more devices through DPS.

If you are looking to provision a single IoT Edge device, create an individual enrollment. If you need multiple devices provisioned, follow the steps for creating a DPS group enrollment.

When you create an enrollment in DPS, you have the opportunity to declare an initial device twin state. In the device twin, you can set tags to group devices by any metric you need in your solution, like region, environment, location, or device type. These tags are used to create automatic deployments.

For more information about enrollments in the device provisioning service, see How to manage device enrollments.

Hope this helps. Do let us know if it helps or have any further queries. We would be happy to assist you.

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