Pre-requisites for Online Upgrade

As mentioned earlier, an online upgrade will allow you to avoid downtime and loss of data. It is important that you take into consideration the complexity and size of your project when planning for this upgrade. It is recommended that you review the following pre-requisites before you start an online upgrade:

1. At least one pair of redundant servers: This is to upgrade one server at the time while the redundant server assumes primary operation, avoiding downtime and loss of data.
2. Upgraded project: Check that your project runs and works properly on Citect SCADA 2018 before migrating to production and starting the online upgrade. If your project is complex or if you are upgrading from a version earlier than v7.20 SP5A, it is recommended that you have a test environment as the offline upgrade could be complex and could involve a long server downtime if done on your production system.
3. Restore runtime files: Check that you have restored the necessary files for runtime onto the appropriate directories to avoid any disturbances on the upgraded live system.
4. Capture data files: To allow historic data to be restored into the new version, you need to assess and move data files to the required location during the upgrade process. This is described in detail in the online upgrade steps in the relevant sections.
5. Configure your running system for Online upgrade: To allow this process to be as smooth as possible, we recommend leveraging of your current redundant system and adding the following Citect.INI parameters before the online upgrade:

• [LAN] EarliestLegacyVersion: Use 7200 for upgrade from v7.20, 7400 for upgrade from v7.40 and 7500 for upgrade from v2015. This will allow your upgraded servers to accept connections from the older version
• [Alarm]EnableStateLogging: Set this parameter to 1 to allow logging the alarm synchronization messages into the syslog.
• [Alarm.<ClusterName>.<AlarmServerName>]ArchiveAfter: This parameter is specific for an upgrade to v2015. If this parameter is not set to Citect 2015, the alarm server will not start up. This is configured for each Alarm Server instance. When configuring this parameter you need to decide what time period of data you wish to maintain during upgrade. For example, if you set this parameter to 1 week, it means that during the upgrade process you will lose any summary data that is older than 1 week. If you don’t want to lose any data, you need to set this parameter to the earliest data in your summary (v7.20) or SOE (v7.30 and v7.40)
• [Debug] Kernel = 1 (optional): Enable this to allow for monitoring the kernel during the upgrade.

Published June 2018