Certificate management

Collectives that consist of Data Archive 2017 servers or later use certificates for communication between a secondary and a primary member.

When you install or upgrade to Data Archive 2017, or later, the setup program generates and stores a self-signed certificate. If you want to replace this certificate with your own certificate, use PI Collective Manager on the target computer.

Note: After you have installed or upgraded Data Archive you cannot use PI Collective Manager to regenerate a self-signed certificate. Instead, use the New-SelfSignedCertificate command in PowerShell 5.0, or later.

Alternatively, use the Microsoft MakeCert tool. After you generate a self-signed certificate, in PI Collective Manager use the Fix certificate issues option to register the certificate with collective members.

You must upgrade each member of the collective to Data Archive 2017, or later. Synchronization of collective members waits until all members are upgraded and their certificates are in place. However, data collection continues and clients are serviced as usual on each Data Archive server, separately, until this process completes.

Note: Which members are out-of-synchronization depends on the order in which you upgrade members.

The certificate affects communication only between a secondary and a primary member, it does not affect communication between the Data Archive server and clients, interfaces, or buffering.