Beckhoff Automation’s TwinCAT/BSD Hypervisor is designed to enable simultaneous execution of virtual machines and TwinCAT real-time applications on an industrial PC (IPC). Optimized hypervisor integration in TwinCAT/BSD, plus matching configurations of Beckhoff hardware and software are designed to provide maximum performance for virtual machines (VMs) while maintaining TwinCAT real-time properties for automation. Different operating systems can be utilized on one IPC, and users can enhance the security properties of the overall system by operating user environments in a modular and isolated manner. For example, TwinCAT real-time applications can operate separately from a Windows desktop environment for machine operation on an IPC. In this context, the Windows operating system runs in a virtual machine environment. Therefore, when Windows restarts, for example, due to software updates, it will not interrupt machine control execution, ensuring machine availability since Windows only restarts within the virtual machine environment and TwinCAT continues to run in the real-time context supported by the TwinCAT/BSD host.
Beckhoff Automation / www.beckhoff.com
