[SCADASEC] How to Tame Virtualization Sprawl

[Brodsky, Jake]

Man, this stuff is a hoot!  I'm not sure where Scott Adams gets his
inspiration from, but it is a wonderfully diseased place.  

But seriously...

Remove the humorous props and ask yourself: is this what your boss is
thinking when people talk about virtualization?  What are we trying to
do here?  Minimize servers?  Because if that's all this is about, then
I'll come right out and say it: there aren't enough servers on a typical
plant to make it worthwhile ripping out what they have and replacing
them with these monsters.  

Furthermore, we need to consider the failure modes.  Many plants have
redundant servers on various power supply and network subsystems so that
if one fails the other may still be left standing.  

What I'm getting at is the number of servers isn't likely to change.
What CAN work well is that should one of the two servers go down, the
other instance can be run on the remaining server.  But the whole reason
for wanting two instances in the first place was so that there would be
a backup.  It serves no useful purpose to put both instances on the same
server.  

Thus, I'm left to conclude that Virtualization may be good for
diagnostics, it may be good for testing patches.  But it isn't all that
useful in most SCADA systems for load balancing or that sort of thing.

Jake Brodsky


-----Original Message-----
From: scadasec-bounces at news.infracritical.com
[mailto:scadasec-bounces at news.infracritical.com] On Behalf Of ljknews
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 5:14 AM
To: scadasec at news.infracritical.com
Subject: Re: [SCADASEC] How to Tame Virtualization Sprawl

At 12:01 PM -0500 2/13/08, ljknews wrote:
> At 10:35 AM -0600 2/13/08, Bob Radvanovsky wrote:
> 
>> ** MODERATOR'S NOTE:  There was discussion about virtualizing control
and plant operations systems.  This article parallels some of the
concerns surrounding 'virtualization', which I don't feel, is ready for
primetime...yet.
> 
> If you have trouble understanding virtualization projects,
> there are explanations available here:
> 
>
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert201833620802
12.gif
>
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert200122241802
13.gif
> 
> :-)

<STEVE_JOBS_MODE>

But wait, there's more:

</STEVE_JOBS_MODE>

http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert200891681021
4.gif
-- 
Larry Kilgallen

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