Let's start with a little story about an engineer
named Jim. Jim has got cavitation on a pump.
This is a pump that is controlled by
PLCs. And the PLCs do not really have any kind of
historian associated with them. I suppose you
can go to the strip charts and try to figure out why they are losing
money because of all the repairs that are being done on this pump.
But what he'd like is something that is a little bit more scalable.
Something that is easier to use.
So what he'd like to do is put in a PI Server.
Now on this PI Server, he is going to install
the OPC Interface. Or with the PI Server,
he will install a second computer with an OPC interface.
It's going to read data from a
OPC Server that he's going to
have the vendor of this PLC install.
Typically the first step in
installing PI is determining what kind of an architecture you are going to have.
Are you going to have one PI Server,
or multiple PI Servers so that you can do high availability.
Are you going to have everything on one computer or a
separate computer for the interfaces etc. What we suggest is
you talk to first and foremost your sales rep from
OSI. That's their mandate to
make sure that you get these answers.
And also, we will probably be
wanting to talk to some folks in IT about your
specific network infrastructure within IT.
Also, sometimes we have tech support get involved in those
kind of things as well as some of the other groups within OSI.
So one way or another, we want to start with a decent
architecture. Now in addition to that, let's also
discuss what type of
machine we would suggest you go out and buy.
Typically what we are going to see is people
buying a name brand type of server
class machine. So it does not take much and we have actually
got some system sizing spreadsheets to help you decide.
But typically what we would see is on an
average size Windows
Server, you are going to be able to do a moderately
sized PI System. And you will find some resources in tech
support like the ones listed here if you
want to know more about system sizing. So now some
other things that we suggest along
with getting decent equipment
is to make sure that when
you install your Operating System, create a NTFS partition.
That actually does some things that we can take
advantage of with regard to security. Also we
do suggest that you exclude any
of the PI or PIPC
directories from any of your virus scanning software.
PI is constantly writing to disk and sometimes it can write
things that might be interpreted as a false
flag within virus scanning. So watch out
for that. Also we do suggest you
disable this NTFS file compression.
Now the PI System is a very memory
intensive application. So we do suggest that you
get as much memory as you can. There
is no hard and fast rule but we give you some
estimates based on that system sizing table that you will
find on that spreadsheet. Now some other things you are
going to need. You are going to need a Windows account that
has privleges. Now this account is going to need to be able
to do things like install and run system services,
modify the registry, create directories, copy files etc.
It does not have to be the admin account,
although a lot of times people do use the administrator
account. Whatever you do use, we do
suggest you use that same account for all installations
of the PI Server. So just a good rule of
thumb to use that same account.
Now the server clock is very important
because PI is working with realtime data.
And realtime data is pretty
finicky when it comes to things like time zones and
day light savings time. We have got some pretty amazing horror
stories of folks-- the guy that picks his computer
up in New York, takes it back to Singapore and
sets it up and sets the time correctly, but
does not change the time zone. So picture this,
you have got a computer that is sitting in Singapore
but the computer thinks it is in New York.
Because PI saves everything as universal coordinated
time, the so called Greenwich Standard
Time, that's not going to work out very well.
So it's very important, make sure you set your server clock properly.
Make sure you set the time zone properly.
Finally you are going to need a license file in order
to install. And you are going to have to get that license file from
either tech support, if you cannot do it yourself, or we do
have nice utilities to let you do it. You will find more information
about this in the class workbook. I am going to demonstrate
as best I can what it's like
getting that file that you are going to need.
So I am going to switch over now
to our tech support website. And
on our tech support website, there is an option
within My Support called
My License Activations. This is assuming that
you have logged in using your regular
technical support credentials. And you should
see a list of the products that you are licensed for.
Go ahead and choose the PI Server and
you click on this generate, and
there is a procedure that you will find here that will allow
you to create for yourself, a license file that you are
going to need to do the installation. What this is going
to do is basically just verify that
you are using the server that's associated
with the copy of the PI System
that you are going to be using.
So there is a couple of things that we do first. First
of all just double check to make sure that you have got the right server
in mind here. Here are some of the details
of your server. Click on that,
double check that you are working with the right server.
Once that looks good, go ahead and download
this machine signature file. It's a little
utility that if you click here, you will download it.
You are going to have to move that file over to your
PI Server. So if your PI Server is not on the web,
and a lot of them are not because of security,
then move that over. I am actually going to do this
here by... I am
going to copy this generator utility over to a
virtual machine that is working
within this particular host machine. So as I close
this, I will now open up a different computer.
You are going to see this all throughout this class and we will be
working on this different computer which is a virtual
machine on this host. So here is that generator
file. It's in a ZIP file and it extracts into an
executable. What you are going to do is run
this, but be sure to run this on the
PI Server on the machine that you have
used when you purchased the license for the
PI Server-- the one you specified as the PI Server.
I will go ahead and double click on this
to run this. This is giving me an option,
where do I want to put this. That's not going to be the name of the
file. Now the
name of the file is going to be the name
of the server. So in this case, my server is called
OSISoft-TRNG. We generate
that file...
And here is that file. That's actually a file
that you are going to copy back from this
PI Server over into some machine that has a web
connection. Or if your PI Server has a web connection, you can do it from there.
But you need to go to a computer that
has got a web connection. Put that file there.
Let me go ahead and show you where I have
placed this in my computer here. I am back on my host computer
now and I have copied that file that was
just generated on the PI Server to this little temporary
directory, MyPI Things, where I am just storing things for the
purpose of the class. Now you can then at this
point, go ahead and pick up the procedure.
The procedure is back on the tech support website,
now that you know the location of that file,
go ahead and browse for that. And you are going to do a
license activation. So let me go ahead and browse for that file.
There it is. Now that's as far as I
can get to demonstrate this.
If I go ahead and choose to generate this activation file, it's actually going to fail.
In this case, it's going to fail
because I have got an internal only license here.
So I cannot really demonstrate this. But what is going
to happen is it's going to
generate a ZIP file. That
ZIP file is going to contain a
PILicense.dat among other things
and instructions etc.
That PILicense.dat is what you are going to make use of
when you do the install. So if I go back
to my virtual machine
now, I am going to use this along with that website
to generate that ZIP file that contains the PILicense.dat
And then when I
go ahead and actually do my installation,
during the installation I am going to go ahead and
I am going to have to specify where that
license.dat file is. I think in this case I just
put it in a local directory on the PI Server.
PILicense.dat -- Remember PI is not installed on this machine yet.
I am going to be installing PI from this
setup screens here.
So during that setup, you are going to be asked
to provide that license.dat and that's how you go
about getting that license.dat file.
One more point, maybe this is belaboring the obvious, but
let me go back to my set of instructions. I want to
show you how to learn more information about this
if you do have problems. Let me just go
back into the tech support site. I am going to go back
and search at the top.
I just followed the procedure here and I said this is
going to create a ZIP file. And it's the ZIP file that contains the license file.
If you go in here and just take a
look for, search for license file.
You will find one of these
KB articles that describes
in great detail exactly
what the process is and what kind of
files are going to be generated. So you can see in
that ZIP file, it's going to give you this
PILicense.dat along with some instructions etc.
So that's how you go about preparing to do your installation.