Virtualization has become mainstream for almost all industrial automation operational technology (OT) products, practices, and applications – albeit still most commonly used in benign computer room environments. It is now common for OT system servers to host multiple virtual machines (VMs) for visualization, historian, redundancy, and many other uses. Virtualization provides benefits for quickly deploying systems, optimizing resource usage, and conveniently backing up configurations.
While generally associated with PCs and servers, virtualization capability has been extended into the more specialized and robust industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and programmable automation controllers (PACs) used for process and machine automation. The many benefits of this move are the topic of a recent article by Vibhoosh Gupta in Control Engineering. Gupta explains that the challenge to virtualizing PLC functions is maintaining high speed determinism. He then goes on to explain how this can be accomplished. According to Gupta, the real advantage to controller virtualization is the addition of an outer loop Linux VM that can work side by side with the real-time deterministic control engine in a safe and cooperative manner. Controller virtualization gives users the same controller-type functionality they need and use today, while adding an optional layer of computing. This effectively allows them to run analytics and machine learning algorithms right at the machine level to further optimize their processes.
To understand how virtualization at the controller level can solve problems for your plant, read the full article here.
How are you currently using virtualization?