ICALEPCS2013 - List of Authors (Lopez Costa, J.B.)

Paper

Title

Page

Application of Virtualization to CERN Access and Safety Systems

214

T. Hakulinen, J.B. Lopez Costa, P. Ninin, H. Nissen, R. Nunes
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Access and safety systems are by nature heterogeneous: different kinds of hardware and software, commercial and home-grown, are integrated to form a working system. This implies many different application services, for which separate physical servers are allocated to keep the various subsystems isolated. Each such application server requires special expertise to install and manage. Furthermore, physical hardware is relatively expensive and presents a single point of failure to any of the subsystems, unless designed to include often complex redundancy protocols. We present the Virtual Safety System Infrastructure project (VSSI), whose aim is to utilize modern virtualization techniques to abstract application servers from the actual hardware. The virtual servers run on robust and redundant standard hardware, where snapshotting and backing up of virtual machines can be carried out to maximize availability. Uniform maintenance procedures are applicable to all virtual machines on the hypervisor level, which helps to standardize maintenance tasks. This approach has been applied to the servers of CERN PS and LHC access systems as well as to CERN Safety Alarm Monitoring System (CSAM).

Poster MOPPC054 [1.222 MB]

Paper	Title	Page
MOPPC054	Application of Virtualization to CERN Access and Safety Systems	214
	T. Hakulinen, J.B. Lopez Costa, P. Ninin, H. Nissen, R. Nunes CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
	Access and safety systems are by nature heterogeneous: different kinds of hardware and software, commercial and home-grown, are integrated to form a working system. This implies many different application services, for which separate physical servers are allocated to keep the various subsystems isolated. Each such application server requires special expertise to install and manage. Furthermore, physical hardware is relatively expensive and presents a single point of failure to any of the subsystems, unless designed to include often complex redundancy protocols. We present the Virtual Safety System Infrastructure project (VSSI), whose aim is to utilize modern virtualization techniques to abstract application servers from the actual hardware. The virtual servers run on robust and redundant standard hardware, where snapshotting and backing up of virtual machines can be carried out to maximize availability. Uniform maintenance procedures are applicable to all virtual machines on the hypervisor level, which helps to standardize maintenance tasks. This approach has been applied to the servers of CERN PS and LHC access systems as well as to CERN Safety Alarm Monitoring System (CSAM).
	Poster MOPPC054 [1.222 MB]