Re: [foxboro] Upgrading Foxboro AW from P91, (Dell 2800), to P91, (Dell 2900), 2003 Server

  • From: Corey R Clingo <corey.clingo@xxxxxxxx>
  • To: foxboro@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:19:48 -0600

I can't imagine that those "restore anywhere" claims hold up in any but 
the simplest of situations.  Windows is so finicky about hardware that if 
you put in a box that's different in any significant way, you are 
seemingly likely to have problems.

In light of that, I wonder if Foxboro or any other DCS vendor has thought 
about ways to minimize the pain they (and their customers) endure at the 
hands of COTS computer vendors and Microsoft (I'll leave the "ditch 
Windows" argument alone for the moment).  Maybe run on a bare-metal 
virtualization layer, a la VMware ESX.  Or decouple themselves from the 
hardware, a la PLC vendors.


They can still test on certain PC configurations, and only support those, 
but there have to be some gains in doing something along these lines.  For 
our Allen-Bradley setup, we can take a newly-installed Windows box, 
install the A-B apps, copy over a few config files, and we're good to go. 
No commits, no special ethernet drivers, no piles of registry edits.  As 
long as you meet some basic hardware specs there is a very good chance it 
will work.


Corey





"Boulay, Russ" <russ.boulay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
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02/09/2009 08:24 PM
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Re: [foxboro] Upgrading Foxboro AW from P91, (Dell 2800), to P91, (Dell 
2900), 2003 Server






Tom,

In the case stated below, you will have to feel the pain.
Symantec like Acronis or other similar packages has a "Restore Anywhere"
feature. However, "Restore Anywhere" works great on baseline Operating
Systems...like XP or Server 2003 barebones with applications on top.
However, dissimilar hardware requires the pertinent drivers.
That includes motherboards..video, ethernet etc.
New offerings of hardware are not on Microsoft plug and play list.
So after loading an image from an older box onto a newer box next
subsequent bootup will start prompting for specific driver CD's ..etc
that may have shipped with the machine. That's with just OS on new
equipment.

The complexity of I/A and the need to bind hardware to the I/A
application causes issues. 
The 2800 used PCI ethernet to communicate to Mesh.
The 2900 uses PCIe (express) to communicate to Mesh.

If you restore the 2800 backup image onto a 2900, the drivers for PCIe
won't exist.
If you load the drivers new, the ethernet cfg. gets initialized..thus
unbinding I/A from the network interface. There is no way to re-bind I/A
to ethernet interfaces except during day0 install as that is when the
virtual mini-port gets created and dual binded to the two ethernet fiber
cards.

So your best approach:
Dell Restore New box to manufacturing image.
Day0 commit to create ethernet bindings and establish I/A in registry.
Then must load any applications like AIM, IACC  etc. so they can get
 



 
 
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