Virtualisation and Software Appliances as Means for Deployment of SCADA in Isolated Systems

The paper discusses the use of virtualisation as a way to deliver a complete pre-configured SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) application as a software appliance to ease its deployment and maintenance. For the off-premise control systems, it allows for deployment to be performed by the local IT servicing teams with no particular control-specific knowledge, providing a "turn-key" solution. The virtualisation of a complete desktop allows to deliver and reuse the existing feature-rich Human-Machine Interface experience for local operation; it also resolves the issues of hardware and software compatibilities in the deployment sites. The approach presented here was employed to provide replicas of the "LUCASZ" cooling system to collaborating laboratories, where the on-site knowledge of underlying technologies was not available and required to encapsulate the controls as a "black-box" so that for users, the system is operational soon after power is applied. The approach is generally applicable for international collaborations where control systems are contributed and need to be maintained by remote teams