Assess and prepare for migration

Identify those platforms to be migrated. JACE controllers must be running at least NiagaraAX 3.8.nn, and be compatible with N4.0. See Platform compatibility and Platform resource requirements for details.

Review the current drivers and applications running on the JACE controllers to be converted. See Driver and application support for details.

If any drivers or applications are unsupported in N4.0, but are critical to retain, you can opt to leave those controllers running AX-3.8, and still integrate them with Niagara 4 Supervisor station. However, you cannot integrate a Supervisor at AX-3.8 with Niagara 4 JACE controllers.

NOTE: For any job that will have a mix of Niagara 4 and AX-3.8 platforms, refer to the section Wire compatibility.

For each AX-3.8 platform to be migrated, identify custom or third-party software modules that it uses. Prior to upgrading, arrange to have those modules refactored as Niagara 4 modules. Contact the custom module vendor to arrange this.

NOTE: You cannot migrate a station to N4 until all of the modules it uses have been refactored for Niagara 4.If you are unsure if an controller has such modules, you can check by making a platform connection to it, then going to the Software Manager view.

Click the “Installed Version” column header to re-sort, as shown above. Scroll down as necessary. Any third-party sourced modules must be refactored by the module vendor before the station can be migrated to Niagara 4. This assumes that all modules installed in the JACE are required by the controller’s currently running station. Any installed module that is not used by the station is inconsequential in for migration.
If you previously built custom modules of Program components, using the ProgramModule feature and its “Program Module Builder” view, you must also refactor these modules. This is something you can do during the migration process.

If you will synchronize users from the N4 Supervisor to the AX station that have been assigned an HTML5 prototype, enable the User Defined 1 configuration flag on the web_WebProfileConfig property of each user prototype slot in the AX station. (This is necessary because the most likely type of user prototype to be selected is an HTML5 prototype. There is no equivalent prototype in an AX station. Consequently, by default, the migration tool assigns the first prototype in the list to each migrated user. This prototype happens to be the Velocity Doc Web Profile.)

Make an N4.0 license request for all platforms to be migrated. You need confirmation that these licenses are ready before migrating the platforms ( AX licenses do not work in Niagara 4).

In almost all cases, the calculated host ID remains the same. An exception is if, on a Windows platform, you are moving from a 32-bit install to a 64-bit install (or vice versa), in this case, the host ID differs.

Be sure to archive the old AX-3.8 license files as well.

Assess and prepare for migration

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