I am looking to plan how long it would take me to upgrade from 7.8.5 to 8.1
I see a guide for 7.9 to 8. Would that be the same as 7.8 to 8 and suffice as a guide? Or might there be additional things I should be concerned about?
Also I really didn’t see in the guide, do you just import the 7.8 project into 8.1 and correct the differences in the guide, Or do you need to manually recreate windows?
Thank you in advance
I would recommend you go to 7.9.18 as an intermediate step.
I would consider that more of a requirement than a recommendation. The 7.8 branch has been unsupported for quite a while, so I don’t think a direct upgrade is well tested. I’d probably go to an early v7.9.x, one that was close to the v7.8 series lifespan, for the same reason. Then go to 7.9.18, then to 8.1 (latest).
Fyi:
@Matrix_Engineering @pturmel @Gaurav.Shitole
Thank you! I appreciate the info.
Now I know this is essentially an unanswerable question. But how long should I allot to complete this project. The 7.8.5 project is pretty simple around 20 windows. Mostly conveyor/tank/valve on off and speed. a few very simple recipe screens. and two a little more complex pasteurizer screens (but still very simple). and some additional popups.
I feel pretty comfortable in Ignition, But I’ve never done an upgrade. So I really don’t know what to estimate. And management needs a timeframe. I was hoping it to be a few weeks. But with the multi step upgrade i’m leaning towards a few months assuming I will have to work out a decent amount of bugs. What sounds fair to you guys?
I have a lot of experience, so I’d budget a couple days for a simple system. But that would be after setting up VMs to simulate the environment, preferably with spare PLC hardware to simulate those.
Always use a virtual environment to test upgrades across major versions. It gives you an opportunity to squash the bugs that are related to changing java versions and drivers of all kinds. Also recommended when jumping several minor versions at once. The only downside to testing in a VM is a bit of extra time. But it is extra time while production is still running. (:
Concur with Phil.
“Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”.
For 7.8…x to 7.9.x you’re looking at a minimum of one 15 minute outage. Prior to the day planned as per attached PDF, I took a GWBK and ran in a sandbox with 10X testing for a month (10X means, if normally 3K tags, use a script to generate another 27K, if normally 10 clients open, run 100, etc). Contact your IA sales rep and they should assist with a 30-day temp licence for this, or if you are an Integrator, avail of your R&D license.
A 7.9.1 to 7.9.18 should be basically the same, in theory should run smoother.
A 7.9.18 to 8.1.12 will have a lot more steps and more downtime, requires more testing in the sandbox.
SCADA Upgrade (Redacted) V2.0.1.pdf (73.0 KB)
@pturmel how long would test in a VM for?
Long enough to simulate everything Ignition connects to for production purposes. A copy of the DB, stand-ins for PLCs, client computers for each project that runs production, et cetera. If you can set up all of that simultaneously, a couple days would suffice. Monitor Ignition CPU load and memory use the whole time. Look for “clock drift” warnings in the logs.