Industrial Automation
The control PC is 20 years old. It doesn't have to fail.
SCADA, Citect, AVEVA Plant SCADA and CNC controllers moved off obsolete, irreplaceable hardware and onto a modern PC running as a virtual machine — same software, same dongles, same behaviour, none of the risk of the original box dying.
The problem
Hardware nobody makes any more, running software you can't afford to lose.
Factory floors are full of control PCs that predate the people running them — years past end of life, unsupported, and one motherboard failure away from stopping a production line outright.
Replacing that PC outright is often not simple. The SCADA package, licence, drivers and dongle were installed once, years ago, on hardware and an operating system that may no longer be obtainable — and the vendor may be long gone. When the hardware finally fails, production stops until a working replacement is found.
Virtualization solves this without touching the control software itself. The existing PC — its disk, its operating system, its SCADA installation — is converted into a virtual machine and run on a current, supported physical host. The system keeps working exactly as it did, but the single point of failure is removed.
Case study
BBC Northern Ireland: a 20-year-old Dell moved onto modern hardware.
A recent project for BBC Northern Ireland is a good illustration of what this work actually involves.
The site was running SCADA on a Dell GX260 — a design roughly 20 years old, with no realistic prospect of replacement hardware if it failed. We converted the machine and moved it to run as a virtual machine on a modern PC.
The main obstacle was the SCADA dongle. It connected via LPT1 (the parallel port) and communicated through the COM port — both of which are effectively extinct on current hardware. We virtualized the LPT1 and COM connections and passed the dongle's signals through to the guest operating system correctly, and the dongle authenticated and functioned exactly as it had on the original PC.
The result: the same SCADA installation, the same licence dongle, running on hardware that is actually supportable — with the 20-year-old Dell no longer a single point of failure.
Coverage
Control systems and the hardware quirks that come with them.
SCADA platforms
Including Citect and AVEVA Plant SCADA, and other SCADA packages running on ageing industrial or desktop-class PCs.
CNC controllers
CNC control computers running proprietary or legacy software tied to a specific, often irreplaceable, machine.
PLCs & HMIs
Programmable logic controller front-ends and human-machine interface stations built around the same generation of hardware.
Legacy ports & dongles
Parallel (LPT), serial (COM) and other obsolete interfaces carrying licence dongles and hardware keys — virtualized and passed through so authentication keeps working.
Process
From legacy control PC to virtual machine.
- 01
Assessment
The existing control PC is examined — hardware, operating system, SCADA or CNC software, and any dongles or peripherals it depends on.
- 02
Planning & design
A virtualization approach is designed around your specific setup, including how any legacy ports or hardware keys will be passed through to the guest system.
- 03
Implementation
The machine is converted into a virtual machine and deployed on modern host hardware, with peripherals and dongles wired through and verified.
- 04
Testing & support
The virtualized system is tested against its original behaviour before handover, with support available afterwards.
Tell us what the system is running and what hardware it depends on — including any dongles — and we'll advise honestly on what virtualizing it involves.