@DailyDose wrote:
Hello. So my co-worker and I were having a discussion today about VI Server. And I had this thought: Is it possible to access a LabVIEW .exe over network via VI-Server? My understanding is that some sort of LabVIEW RTE needs to be running on the target machine so that VI server is indeed running. Which kind of seems little lame to me. So my overall question.
There's a misunderstanding about how things work here. RTE refers to the LabVIEW Run-Time Engine. It's a set of libraries that allows a LabVIEW executable to run; it's not a standalone program. When you launch an application built in LabVIEW, the application loads the parts of the run-time engine that it needs. This is no different than needing to install the correct version of the .NET framework in order to run some Windows applications.
VI Server is also not a standalone application; it's a service that can be enabled in a LabVIEW application. I'm not sure what you think is lame here - in order to establish a network connection, there needs to be a server running to accept that connection. In the case of VI Server, that server is an application built in LabVIEW that has VI Server enabled.
DailyDose wrote:
Can I, from my PC and through LabVIEW, turn on a LabVIEW .exe on a different machine that does not have any type of LabVIEW running? From there, the goal would be then to access that .exe via VI server, of course assuming that we know the name of the VI running. If it is possible, sampel code would be greatly appreciated.
So your question is basically: Is there some way I can start an application remotely on another computer? There's nothing specific to LabVIEW about this question. Look into Remote Shell. Once you've successfully launched a LabVIEW application on the remote machine, then yes, you can connect to it using VI Server (again, assuming VI Server is enabled in the application's INI file). The remote machine will still need to have the LabVIEW Run-Time Engine installed.
