Plan your virtualized environment

AVEVA System Platform supports several virtualization architectures to suit different IT environments and performance requirements. These architectures help organizations optimize hardware utilization, improve system reliability, and simplify deployment and maintenance. ​

Before you begin setting up a virtualized environment for System Platform, you need to determine which type of environment is best suited for your requirements. This guide discusses three basic virtual architectures and how each can be implemented for System Platform:

• Single host configuration

• Distributed (multiple) hosts

• High availability cluster configuration

Considerations

In critical environments, ensuring continuous system availability is essential. Two key strategies that support this objective are High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR).

High Availability (HA) focuses on minimizing unplanned downtime by providing fault tolerance within the same site or data center. It typically involves redundant virtual machines, failover clustering, and shared storage to ensure that if one component fails, another takes over with little to no interruption.

Disaster Recovery (DR) addresses large-scale failures—such as power outages and natural disasters—by enabling the recovery of critical systems at a secondary site. DR solutions replicate virtual machines, data, and configuration to geographically separated infrastructure, allowing rapid restoration of services with minimal data loss.

Together, HA and DR form the backbone of a resilient virtual architecture, ensuring that operations can continue reliably and recover swiftly under both localized and catastrophic failure scenarios.