Emerson Exchange 365

JoshC. Is this an Online or an Offline upgrade. It seems like an Online upgrade. If so, I would strongly recommend involving someone that has experience. Your LBP should be able to help, either from their pool of DeltaV service engineers, or by involving the SureService team from Emerson. Some of the "gotchas" are dependent on your configuration and your process.

Most customers perform a few major release upgrades (one every two to 5 years) and even fewer do these Online. All the preparation and planning will not equal the value of having an experienced engineer who has performed ten or twenty of these types of upgrades.

When reviewing Release notes, you should review both v12 and v13 release notes. I would suggest you review v12.3, v12.3.1, v13.3 and v13.3.1 to ensure you fully understand any issues that are known but not resolved. Engaging the Sure Service team will mean someone that has already done this. They can then work with you to confirm any risks or concerns in your configuration.

Online upgrades require a switchover of the existing version to the new version controller. During this switchover, the behavior of existing controllers not yet upgraded will be based on the v11.3.1 version. How do they respond to switchover? The controller Redundancy Analyzer in v11 will identify configurations that make remote references whereby CALC, CND and ACT actions might see lost connection and in previous versions, these were recommended to have the Algo_otpions set to Abort on Read Errors. If your configuration has already been setup to handle remote references for seamless switchover, you should be good. Although v13.3.1 addresses many of these issues without user configuration changes, our un-migrated controllers should be tested prior to migrating to ensure the v11.3.1 configuration will not experience spurious trips.

Your Upgrade plan should specifically address your Historian. If you are replacing the App Station with history, you will want to issue a data set transfer to close out the active data set just prior to interrupting the Historian. When you bring the new station on line, you should also issue a dataset transfer to start a new Active Dataset. You will then be able to recover the datasets from the previous instance of the historian server with a minimum loss of data collection.

Since you have a server, do you also have a Domain? If so, you should take steps to preserve the Domain. Otherwise, you will have to have all the existing computers leave the old domain and join the new one. The domain is defined by a GUID, not the domain name. If you build you new Pro Plus as a Domain controller simply by enabling the role and naming the domain to be the same, that is not the same domain.

Andre Dicaire