Software and hardware considerations for virtualised protection and control

A Virtualized Protection and Control (VPAC) System is one in which the software is not fixed to the hardware but rather agnostic to and managed independently of the hardware. A middleware layer, consisting of a hypervisor, assigns those hardware resources such as RAM, Disk Space or CPU Cores to the Software Applications. Before VPAC systems can reach the technological maturity required for business-as-usual implementation, testing must demonstrate the robustness of the third-party industrial servers suitable for the substation control room environments and real time protection applications. This paper will share the results of testing for resilience where component failures are simulated amid worst case scenarios. Boundary condition testing is really important with VPAC systems so that it is known how many Protection Applications can run on a given hardware and this paper will show how many Sampled Value streams could be processed by Network Interface Cards and Virtual Machines and also how many Virtual Machines could operate on the given hardware. VPAC systems are not inherently deterministic, and this paper will share the results of round-trip testing to compare the relative impact and performance of different VPAC architectures.