Suggestions for 8.1.9 to 8.1.53 upgrade

Ignition
1

Hi all,

one of my customers asked me to upgrade its 8.1.9/10 Ignition installations to the latest 8.1.x (8.1.53 as of writing). I’m worried about next topics:

  1. that customer has 2 plants, each with its own Ignition (1st is 8.1.9, 2nd is 8.1.10). The two Ignitions are connected in a Gateway Network:
    • they send messages each other
    • the 1st shares its gateway tags with the 2nd as a remote tag provider
  2. both projects read/write many data from/to databases through system.db.xxxxxfunctions in python scripts

Problem nr 1: I cannot upgrade both installations at the same time - may be there will be 1 or 2 weeks delay between the two. Will the Gateway Network still work correctly in the meanwhile? I mean in the time when plant 1 is already upgraded to 8.1.53 and plant 2 is still 8.1.10?

Problem nr 2: I read in the manual that there are disruptive changes in some system.db.xxxxxxfunctions. What will I have to pay attention to? Will I have to rewrite any Python logic regarding db reading/writing?

Are there any further disruptive changes I’ll have to pay attention to? (still a Vision project)

Thanks in advance, regards

2

I don't think you'll have any issues, but to be safe, scan through the release notes for all the versions between the older versions and now to see what's been changed. If you were upgrading to 8.3.x you'd have to do more, but I believe the upgrade should be fairly painless.

4 Likes
3

I recently upgraded a redundant 8.1.24 gateway to 8.1.52 running Vision for the main plant SCADA with a few prespective pages mainly for engineering. It was also part of a gateway network with other gateway using it as a remote tag provider for reporting purposes. The upgrade ran smoothly with no issues with gateway network. Additionally, in terms of the system.db funtions i believe the changes have mainly been bug fixed or adding functionality. Nothing is deprecated until you get to 8.3 even then at least in the earlier verison they still work.

However, if you want to be sure I would recommend taking the gateway backups and running it on a engineering machine/docker and uprgrading that gateway to the latest version and do some function tests if you dont have a dev environment.
Good luck.

4

If you have any vision clients running on a Raspberry Pi, you may need to look at this (from painful experience):

5

Its pretty painless. I did it recently for a few customers and the only thing I had to do was to install the new Vision client on all the computers beforehand.