About Installing the Historian Server for the First Time

You can choose one of the following types of installation:

Single server: This is for a stand-alone Historian system, which contains only one Historian server. This type of system is suitable for a small-scale Historian setup.
Mirror primary server and distributed/mirror node: This is for a horizontally scalable Historian system, which contains multiple Historian servers, all of which are connected to one another. This type of system is used to scale out the system horizontally. For example, if you have 5,00,000 tags in your Historian system, you can distribute them among the various servers to improve performance.
In this setup, one of the nodes acts the primary server, whereas the others are the distributed/mirror servers. Configuration Manager and the embedded web services are installed only on the primary server, which are used by the distributed/mirror servers as well.
When the Archive Duration property is changed in a distributed environment, the changes will take effect after 15 minutes.
The distributed environment works only for tag data; it does not work for alarms and events data. Therefore, do not install alarm archiver in a distributed environment.
In this setup, one of the nodes acts the primary server, whereas the others are the distributed/mirror nodes.

For all these types of installation, you can use the GUI-based installer or the Command Prompt window. You can also install the Historian server in a cluster environment.

This section provides the high-level steps in installing the Historian server for the first time. You can perform the same steps to upgrade the server. If you are upgrading from either Historian 6.0 Enterprise or previous releases of Historian 7.2 (including any of the service packs), both Client Manager and Configuration Manager services will be removed. However, this will have no impact on your data or use of Historian unless you intend to use a distributed system.

Note: The number of alarms in the Historian Alarms and Eventss database, and the frequency of new events being added during the installation, impact the time it takes to install Historian. For example, an installation for a system with 1.5 million alarms can take up to three hours to complete.

Important: You cannot use size-based archives with a Historian Mirror Primary Server and Historian Mirror Node installation. This is because having archives of different sizes introduces archive synchronization risks in a mirrored environment. The restriction is enforced on all Historians, even those not using mirroring.

Important: Be aware that you cannot close your current archive with a Historian Mirror Primary Server and Historian Mirror Node installation. This is because closing the current archive introduces archive synchronization risks in a mirrored environment. The restriction is enforced on all Historians, even those not using mirroring.