The time has come to renew my OSIsoft vCampus subscription. This is the second year of the vCampus program and my second year participating. In case you are not familiar with vCampus, you can find the site here http://vcampus.osisoft.com.

I’ve been working with PI since PI 3 was released on Windows NT around 1996. I have been earning a living primarily as a PI professional services provider since 2000. In the early days, I was only able to get my hands on new PI software when a customer ordered it. This was frustrating because I ran into the classic chicken and egg scenario where I could not try software and work on demos until a customer purchased it and customers were reluctant to purchase the new software because I had not tried it. OSIsoft addressed the program a few years ago with their partner program. Partners received licenses for all of the PI software. For the first time, I was able to build sand box environments and try everything.

Last year OSIsoft decided to improve on this model and start the virtual campus or vCampus site. As a developer I subscribe to the vCampus site for an annual fee of $1500. I receive a logon to the vCampus site and have access to pretty much everything I need to develop applications around the OSIsoft PI system. Through vCampus I have access to all of the PI software including many early beta releases. The vCampus site is a virtual community with hundreds of developers working on PI. We communicate on forums and exchange ideas and work out problems. OSIsoft developers post blog entries to give us a windows into what they are thinking. OSIsoft also hosts many webinars to explore topics suggested by the community. I also have access to all of the official documentation as well as many white papers. I would say that the vCampus site has greatly enhanced the development community that has grown around the PI products.

I also have a Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) subscription. This gives me access to all of the Microsoft software as well as access to developer forums and other items. The combination of MSDN and vCampus allows me to keep up to date with all of the new releases as they come out. When customers decide to deploy something, it is likely that I have already been working with it for months.

I am configuring the following in a VMWare Workstation environment:

VM 1:

• Windows 2003 Domain Controller

VM 2:

• Windows 2008
• SQL Server 2008
• Microsoft Sharepoint Server Enterprise 2003 SP2 with Excel Services
• PI Server 3.4.380 (Windows Integrated Security)
• Application Framework (AF) Server 2.1
• PI Advanced Calculation Enginer (ACE) 2.1
• Rt Webparts (Sharepoint Portal)
• PI DataLink for Excel Services
• PI OLEDB Provider 3.3.0.1
• PI SQL Data Access Server (DAS) 32 bit
• PI to PI interface
• PI System Management Tools 3.3.1.3

Having this environment already configured in VMWare offers many advantages.

1. I can save a snapshot of the system prior to experimenting. This allows me to easily return to the starting point after the experiment.
2. I can easily deploy a copy of the environment and begin developing a prototype for a customer. I do not have to spent a lot of time configuring a development environment. The customer gets better bang for their buck.
3. I can work on my workstation at the office or copy the VM to my laptop and take it on the road.
4. While on the road I can use the PI to PI interface to feed live data from a production PI system to develop prototypes without the risk of interfering with that production environment. If available, I can also use a VPN connection to do the same thing. I can very quickly configure a prototype for the customer to try without ever having to set foot on site. In today’s world of reduced budgets and tight timelines, this is a perfect development scenario.

I have also done some experimenting with Terminal Services Gateway. This enables me to remotely run applications in my development environment. This could be very convenient when I am on the road as I can leave everything running on my workstation and just access it remotely via my wireless card. I could also easily give access to customers. Of course I was able to do this sort of stuff back in 1992 on Unix systems but it is still exciting to be able to do it with my favorite PI software today.

I just finished participating in the OSIsoft vCampus Introductory Webinar. The OSIsoft vCampus is a new community designed to assist developers in developing applications around PI. This is a fantastic initiative in my opinion.

I have been working with PI for about 12 years. In the beginning there was the PI server, DataLink, and ProcessBook. It was pretty easy to sit down and get started. As the product mix grew I ran into the problem that it was not easy to get my hands on the new products and test them out. Once I became a consultant it was even worse because I was not a customer and there was no way to establish a formal relationship with OSIsoft.

I joined the OSIsoft Partner Program last year and was able for the first time as a consultant to establish a formal relationship with OSIsoft and get my hands on all of their products. In the past I had to wait until one of my customers purchased a product in order to get the opportunity to play with it and learn to use it. The Partner Program allowed me for the first time to test products and work on demo applications for everything that OSIsoft produced. This was good for me and I’m sure that it was ultimately good for them.

This year they are taking the concept one step further and introducing vCampus. The site offers a reference library containing all of the product documentation in one easy location. More importantly, they are adding white papers and field notes to help with common problems and to share best practices. The site offers discussion forums with direct OSIsoft developer participation and Blogs produced by developers and product managers.

The vCampus subscription provides me with a developer license for all of OSIsoft’s products. This is a tremendous asset as I am able to get up to speed on new technologies and experiment with new concepts. The site offers a DVD image download containing all of up to date products. New images will be released frequently. Ultimately a Microsoft Updates type of service is planned. The licensing is pretty robust and allows the developer to build up to a 3 server collective in order to test HA configurations and also test applications against HA.

Finally the vCampus allows developers access to the PI SDK and AF SDK. A couple of years ago OSIsoft announced that they would curtail access to the SDK’s. They later decided that they needed to provide access to the SDK’s in order to encourage development around PI but they also needed to maintain the quality of applications and prevent developers from creating poorly constructed programs that might cause problems.

It looks like OSIsoft has devoted 3 full time people to vCampus. This should help to insure that the initiative gets the traction that it needs to really take off. 

You can checkout vCampus and join at :http://vCampus.OSIsoft.com

I said that I would be live blogging from the users conference. If you have ever been then you know how busy it can get. Things are pretty packed from morning until night.

We are heading into the end of the conference today and I guess I could say that I was just waiting to get a little perspective on things before I started shooting my mouth off.

A lot of things have changed since I was last at the conference in 2002. For the most part these changes are good and I’ll try to cover most of the high points.

I guess the most important thing to cover is the recent PR1 release of PI and the updated road map. The PR1 release is a major milestone and it really is the result of OSI realizing that the PI server needed some major new functionality to keep up with user needs.

A few years ago we (the users) started to identify some major roadblocks and impediments to growing larger PI systems and reliably collecting data. The two major problems were the buffering subsystem and the fact that there was no easy way to replicate PI data to more than one server. In effect you had all of your eggs in one basket and the way to get the eggs to the basket could be flakey at times.

The PR1 release introduced a new buffering subsystem with major improvements. The main thing that was added was a more transactional approach to submitting data to the PI server. In the past we had all had problems where an interface node would buffer data and then for one reason or other the buffer would be emptied but the data would not show up on the PI server. You had essentially lost the data with no way to recover it. The more transactional approach insures that the data makes it to the PI server. The buffer nodes checks to make sure that the data showed up in the archive before it deletes the information from the buffer.

The second major improvement is the High Availability (HA) PI “collective”. This upgrade to the PI server makes it possible for an interface node to feed several PI servers. It also makes it possible for multiple PI servers to synchronize their data. This is much improved from the PI to PI interface. Upgrades on the client end make this transparent to the users. They connect to PI as they always have but on the back end they may be connecting to one of many servers. This is HUGE. It allows you to take down a server for maintenance transparently. It means that if a server fails, your users never know. It also means that you could set up a server to service your users who hammer your server with huge historical data queries while another services your regular users. These are just a few examples but the architectural possibilities and your ability to engineer a systems that meets your availability, performance, and regulatory needs is greatly enhanced.

There are several other new features that are coming for the PR2 release. Some of them will be released in a bridge release prior to the PR2 release.

I’ll need to write a lot more about this stuff. I attended one of the PI server presentations presented by some of the OSI developers where they showed a 64bit Windows Server 2008 box that cost about $20,000 running with 21 million PI tags. 500,000 of those tags were being updated every second. The tags were separated into different partitions each with its own snapshot table and set of archives. This allowed them to support future data, a long time items on a lot of wish lists. It also means that the archive data is being written across multiple physical disk spindles which alleviates another performance bottleneck. While it is one thing to do this in the lab and another thing entirely to have a system in the field, it is good to know that they are working to stay ahead of demand.

There are a lot of other new things that I need to cover. The licensing is being updated with Enterprise agreements and site licenses which will free you from point count constraints. This is a big change that I need to cover. There are also a lot of new tools out there to cover.

 Please check back for additional post over the next few days.

I will be live blogging from the OSISoft Conference in a couple of weeks. It has been about 3 years since I have been able to make it to a conference and I am really looking forward to catching up on the latest developments.