Backup and disaster recovery (DR)

AVEVA System Platform is a mission-critical industrial software suite that supports real-time operations, SCADA, and HMI workloads. Any disruption can lead to significant production downtime, safety risks, or data loss. In a virtualized deployment, a robust backup and disaster recovery (DR) plan is essential to ensure the availability of critical system components.

A well-designed backup strategy protects against data corruption, configuration errors, or accidental deletions, while a DR plan enables rapid recovery from hardware failures, cyber incidents, or site-level outages. Together, they ensure the System Platform environment can be restored quickly and reliably, minimizing operational impact and supporting business continuity.

System backup recommendations

• For long-term archival, use VM-level backup solutions, not snapshots.

• Store backups off-host or off-site for DR compliance.

• VM should be in shutdown state while backing up the VM.

• Application backups should be taken as needed

Checkpoint (Hyper-V) and Snapshot (vSphere) recommendations

Creating Checkpoints in Hyper-V, or Snapshots in vSphere lets you return to a specific configuration of your VM. This can be especially helpful for disaster recovery (DR), when you need to revert your VM to a state that you know was free of corruption or other issues.

• Create Checkpoints/Snapshots when your VM is in shutdown state.

  • During runtime, AppEngines have transient data that should not be used as part of a DR scenario.

  • Runtime checkpoints/snapshots are larger, hence require larger storage allocations.

• Limit each VM to a single Checkpoint/Snapshot.

  • Multiple Checkpoints/Snapshots may affect performance during runtime (file journaling).

  • Snapshots need to be done at a frequency to keep in compliance with IT policies.

    • Leverage Microsoft monthly patching. Take the snapshot after the update completes (while the VM is shutdown).

• Don't use Checkpoints/Snapshots for long-term archival. Use backup solutions for that.

Backup and Snapshot/Checkpoint considerations

• IT policies may have changed since the time of the snapshot making the images out of date (with respect to IT compliance)

• Expiration of the domain trusted relationship

• Active Directory configuration changes since the snapshot was taken.

• Checkpoint/Snapshots are NOT substitutes for backups. They're temporary states, not permanent copies.