Virtualization of Operator Consoles on Beamline Control System

We consolidated more than 50 operator consoles of SPring-8 beamlines into four server computers by using virtualization technology. Virtualization technology has been a hot topic in server computing in recent years. We evaluated and studied several virtualization products for several years. To test feasibility of virtualization technology, we installed Xen into the control systems of a few beamlines two years ago. We presented the results of our experiment of introducing virtualization technology at the previous ICALEPCS conference. In the past six months, we installed Xen into the rest of the beamlines. We were able to reduce the number of computer hardware systems and maintenance costs while ensuring the capability of the control system. In this paper, we describe an example of introducing virtualization technology into operator consoles.