Top-end control system system architecture? Please explain?

[The Plc Kid]

It helps to make all your servers exactly the same. You can do with a 2 host (Physical Server) setup but 3 is recommended.

We do 2 here for most manufacturing systems but we use Stratus servers http://www.stratus.com/ which are fault tolerant and so that is pretty much a 4 host setup in terms of reliability.

Try to get Intel VPro on any hardware you buy desktop or server as it makes out of band management easy. (Out of band would be where the is a blue screen or BIOS issue)and will give you control and remote access even to repair BIOS level problems. On Servers I still have a remote management card even with Vpro as there are some things Vpro cant do.

If you go with standard servers stay with Dell or HP. Dell management card is called IDRAC and HP's management card is called ILO.

 

[The Plc Kid]

Also your corporate side firewall does not have to be an hardware appliance it can be a virtual machine running on one of the hosts but if budget permits an applince is good for simplicity.

For your switches stay with a Cisco product.

If this system is critical you may want to invest in redundancy on wonderware. hareware and VM redundancy does not protect you from software issues like a freeze ,crash but application redundancy does like a redundant wonderware historian,etc.

Wonderware supports redundancy pretty well o most of their product line.

If you have volume liscensing or if you buy it for your server OS it may may sense to buy the data center version as you can run unlimited VM's on it. You will need a license for each physical server.

If they plan to use active directory and you will have a virtual domain controller make 2 of them as running 1 DC can be problematic.

If you go with data center I would split up the DNS and DHCP roles also as seperate servers.

For your UPS you may want 1 for each physical server Vs 1 large on to reduce single points of failure. a network management card is a nice add on for the UPS.

for the remote access laptop make sure you use the SSL VPN in the firewall and use dual factor authentication unless you want your SCADA system to be a playground for me and my rowdy friends

 

[rustydud]

Video I just watched that I found helpful to understanding Virtualization. Great video for beginners.