ICALEPCS 2009
MOD006
Migrating Control Servers and Applications to Virtual Machines
C.Angel, C.Finlay, E.Matias, G.Wright* (CLS)
At the Canadian Light Source, there are an ever-increasing number of distributed Controls applications that can run on generic networked computers. This has led to additional servers when segregation by operating system or by LAN has been required. Additional concerns of maintenance of older computer hardware, driver support for older O/S's on new hardware, and growing Virtual LAN issues have led to an adoption of moving applications to Virtual Machines. Our implementation using VMware Infrastructure provides a high reliability environment, with centralized monitoring of performance and simplified expandability. The distributed 'average' reliability hardware has been replaced by a single high-reliability system with built-in redundancies. A new virtual machine can be started in a matter of minutes from an existing pre-configured template, and can be joined to up to four VLANs with a simple software configuration.