Virtualization a Reality in Control Systems
We have been blogging about the benefits of virtualization in control systems, see the blog posts here. Asset owners have been reluctant to embrace virtualization until it was blessed by the vendor, and this is understandable. A few vendors have been working on virtualization support, and the highlight for me at the AREVA User Group meeting was to hear that they working with virtualization.
The first step is to ’support’ virtualized environments. This means when a customer calls vendor support with a problem and the discussion reveals he is running it on ESX or some other platform, the support person does not reject the call. AREVA is now supporting the most popular virtualized environments and looking to expand the list of supported virtualization solutions. They are treating it like any other OS. For example, we support our application on Windows XP, Red Hat Linux Version X.X and VMware ESX.
The second step is to actually deploy new SCADA systems on virtualized systems. AREVA has its first customer in the process of deploying a new e-terra on a virtualized solution. Virtualization is now another customer option.
When the community gets more comfortable with virtualization performance and understands the benefits in fast recovery, patch testing / rollback, redundancy, legacy OS support, … the virtualization will be common. In fact, my prediction is in 3 years more than half of all new deployments will include the substantial use of virtualization.
Author: Dale Peterson
Posted: June 12th, 2009 under SCADA Architecture, VM.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from Ron Southworth
Time: June 17, 2009, 2:09 am
Hi Dale I know you guys are fans of virtualisation.
I am glad to read that companies are satarting to move SCADA products into environments that support virtualisation. As always someone has to go first so this is something that I for one will be looking closely at how the effort progresses over time.
I agree it certainly has a place and that I feel comfortable with using virtualisation for testing and non production environments. The question is more one of compatability of a given SCADA package with the virtualised environment and given time I am certain this is something we will see a lot more of without all of the headaches I have seen that temper my enthusiasm, with the conservative side of my mind bubbling up to the surface.
The good news, from me at least is that this is ultimately something that time itself alone will ease through validation of projected resilience statistics as I am yet to be convinced that a virtualised environment equates to higher availability.
Common environments = common vulnerabilities type equations spring to mind actually.
All the best.
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