Case Study. SCADA System Virtualisation

Transcription

1 Case Study SCADA System Virtualisation

2 Executive Summary Control System applications running on ageing hardware are the sources of many headaches. When these older systems are relied upon for production evidently the asset replacement project will be daunting. Virtualisation might be a tempting proposal? possibly if designed properly. This is not a new concept; we replicated a validated legacy pharmaceutical system on new hardware years ago! DON T: The simple technique of running windows based virtual players is widely used. Whilst this is a very useful tool during the development and testing, don t be tempted to use these systems on a production environment. These do not provide a robust control system platform. DO: Design your Hardware infrastructure properly combined with Professional virtualisation products in order to achieve the reliability required by mission critical applications. We recently completed a large SCADA migration in the Utility industry where a legacy server farm was migrated to new servers running virtual machines and storage array. Each Server is configured to run a number of virtual machines with the overall solution providing: Savings ( ) Simplified Management Simplified Disaster Recovery Hardware Independence Energy Saving Virtualisation is a cost-saving proposition with reduced administrative time and fewer infrastructure requirements Resource optimisation, high availability and point-in-time snapshots of servers. Fast and easy rapid disaster recovery methods. Protected against ageing hardware, your control system investment will last. Server room Air Conditioning, Power and UPS requirements are decreased. Peak Ltd All rights registered. Registered in England: Peak Ltd Sci-Tech Daresbury, Innovation Centre, Keckwick Lane, Daresbury, Cheshire WA FS

3 The live replacement was a seamless exercise thanks to a robust design. We help our customers to save money and increase performance in the area of process and plant automation. We do this through the unique combination of Systems Integration, Consultancy and Performance Management services using our team of control system experts. Our customers include major companies in the Pharmaceutical, Utility, Food, Nuclear and Chemical sectors and also R&D companies who recognise our ability to listen to their needs. If you are interested to find how this could benefit you or your customers, please visit or contact Michael Thomas (mthomas@peak.com) Ageing SCADA system and high plant availability don t go well together. For this particular project, virtualisation made perfect sense. We were able to deploy the virtual environment with no downtime of the control system, a key requirement in the Water industry. The benefits are vast, especially around the savings generated in future administration and maintenance. Grant Stevenson, Director, Peak Limited Peak Ltd All rights registered. Registered in England: Peak Ltd Sci-Tech Daresbury, Innovation Centre, Keckwick Lane, Daresbury, Cheshire WA FS

4 Details: Peak migrates a large Water SCADA system using VMWare ESXi and Rockwell Software Background Ageing large SCADA platform is becoming difficult to support. As part of a planned asset replacement, legacy servers were substituted with servers running virtual machines. Virtualised SCADA Platform Windows Server 0 R is used for the servers whilst Windows is used for the client workstations. All Operating Systems are configured to CPNI best practices to ensure that they are hardened and secure. Rockwell FTViewSE Version.0 SCADA software is installed to monitor and control the plant assets. FTView SE in Thin Client form is used to provide visualisation to the plant controller. Finally, a Rockwell FT Historian SE which is used to log and retrieve historical plant data. Quick tips on Architecture VLANs have been created to provide the segmentation of the local network. VLAN topologies provide broadcast filtering and improved traffic flow management. This architecture provides administrators with better scalability, security, and network management. Use of iscsi Network Storage arrays gives an extremely versatile platform for data storage. Virtual machine images can be stored in separate groups of RAID configured disks ensuring data security across the whole virtual environment. The configuration of multiple data paths through dual network switches also gives the advantage of greater bandwidth and performance across the iscsi interface. The importance of a well-conceived and consistent security policy across the entire system is essential in the initial design of the architecture as often data exchange between virtual machines for different users can be difficult to identify. The use of a virtual terminal server to run the SCADA application client has meant that configuration of all control room and site wide SCADA clients has become a simple remote desktop operation on any networked PC. No more maintenance required on Clients with a view terminal rebuild taking place in minutes. The ESXi environment is integrated into SD card storage in the server. Therefore the need for a local hard disk is eliminated providing greater system reliability and reducing the risk of software corruption. Peak Ltd All rights registered. Registered in England: Peak Ltd Sci-Tech Daresbury, Innovation Centre, Keckwick Lane, Daresbury, Cheshire WA FS

5 ACT Stack No. Status M Fan ACT Reset Corporate / Internet Control Room Clients Device Management Process Network Firewall Fibre PowerConnect SW PowerConnect 0 Fibre SW PowerConnect SW HDMI PowerEdge R - PowerEdge R - PowerEdge R - PowerConnect SAN SW PowerConnect SAN SW HDMI PowerVault MDi We help our customers to save money and increase performance in the area of process and plant automation. We do this through the unique combination of Systems Integration, Consultancy and Performance Management services using our team of control system experts. Our customers include major companies in the Pharmaceutical, Utility, Food, Nuclear and Chemical sectors and also R&D companies who recognise our ability to listen to their needs. If you are interested to find how this could benefit you or your customers, please visit or contact Michael Thomas (mthomas@peak.com) Peak Ltd All rights registered. Registered in England: Peak Ltd Sci-Tech Daresbury, Innovation Centre, Keckwick Lane, Daresbury, Cheshire WA FS