Ethernet I/P communications and VLANs

    I have a rather large machine with a lot of ethernet devices. There is a main dell Powerconnect 7024 ethernet switch that I am using to manage all of the ethernet traffic.

    In the dell switch I have set up VLANs to cut down on ethernet traffic to the ethernet cards I have on my ControlLogix PLC (3 total).

    Now, I have LRMates on this machine with R30iA v7.7 controllers. This is where I'm having trouble......

    My PLC is on VLAN 3 with an IP address of 172.16.3.2 for example, my robot is 172.16.4.3 (subnets are set at 255.255.0.0).

    My safety CIP connection is working fine, but my normal ethernet I/P connection is going in and out. About 1 second of a good connection and 7 seconds of no connection. I know my PLC is configured correctly since when the switch is at factory settings it works just fine.

    Is there something in the Ethernet I/P connection in Fanuc that would not allow VLANs to work? We've had a similar setup before and it worked fine, but I didn't have ethernet safety...

    Any suggestions will help.

    Thanks

    How do you have the ENET cards in your rack connected to the robot? You stated you have 3 cards. Is the Dell switch managed and what are your RPIs for your connections?

    Note - Rockwell doesn't allow multiple devices on the same ENET card to have duplicate IP addresses in version 20 or lower of RSLogix5k. I have heard v21 does but I haven't used it yet. You can get away with one ENET connection to your robot from 1 ENET card in your rack and still use E/IP safety and standard E/IP I/O together. You need to assign an IP address to the E/IP safety module in the I/O configuration tree in L5k and the standard I/O module gets a hostname. FANUC added a DNS server to the robot software that can resolve the hostname. There is a system variable for the DNS server. I have used this several times and it works out great as compared to using the seperate ENET cards in the CLogix rack. Saves $$$.

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