Red Hat Builds Soft Real-Time vPAC on RHEL, KVM, and Podman
For decades, power utilities leaned on rigid, single-vendor “black box” hardware. Now, Red Hat is changing that story. The company has built a working soft real-time vPAC demonstrator. It runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, KVM, and Podman. As a result, utilities finally get a path toward open, software-defined substations.
Old proprietary appliances locked utilities into long hardware cycles. In fact, some refresh cycles stretched up to 20 years. Meanwhile, simple cybersecurity patches needed major on-site effort. Therefore, innovation moved at a frustratingly slow pace. Red Hat’s new approach aims to fix that gap.
The demonstrator centers on protection, automation, and control, or PAC, functions for substations. Specifically, this soft real-time vPAC setup runs critical protection workloads as virtual machines or containers. Meanwhile, these workloads sit safely alongside non-critical systems like SCADA and HMI tools. Consequently, utilities can mix vendors and technologies on a single server.
Red Hat’s lab setup uses an Intel Xeon-based industrial server as the hypervisor host. Additionally, it includes dedicated networking gear to separate process bus and station bus traffic. A precision time protocol clock keeps everything synced. To test real-world conditions, the team used a hardware-in-the-loop simulator. This simulator mimics a medium-voltage substation with ten bays.
Two vendors power the protection logic side by side. ABB runs its SSC600SW software as a virtual machine. Meanwhile, Euto Energy, a Netherlands-based startup, runs its vSAS platform inside a Podman container. This combination proves multi-vendor and multi-technology workloads can share one box without conflict. Moreover, the setup isolates CPU cores for real-time tasks, so performance stays sharp.
During testing, engineers injected faults into the simulated grid. The protection system detected each fault instantly. Then, it sent a trip signal to open the circuit breaker. Thanks to precise timing sync, the whole response stayed within the required 10-millisecond limit. This result confirms the platform meets strict grid-reliability standards.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux powers the entire stack underneath. It uses a real-time kernel tuned for low latency. Likewise, the RT version of KVM hosts protection VMs with near-bare-metal speed. Podman, on the other hand, handles lightweight, containerized functions. Furthermore, Ansible Automation Platform manages deployment and keeps configurations consistent across the fleet. Cockpit, the built-in web console, gives technicians an easy way to monitor system health too.
Security stays front and center in this design. RHEL includes SELinux, firewall protections, and UEFI Secure Boot by default. Additionally, the OpenSCAP scanner checks systems against CIS Benchmark standards. This setup helps utilities pass NERC CIP and NIS2 compliance audits more easily.
Looking ahead, Red Hat recommends a three-node cluster for production environments. This approach unlocks high availability and supports rolling maintenance. As a result, utilities can update systems without downtime. The whole reference design builds on the LF Energy SEAPATH project, which includes over 1,200 open source packages.
In short, this soft real-time vPAC demonstrator shows utilities don’t need vendor lock-in anymore. Instead, they can run multiple protection vendors, swap technologies freely, and update security in days, not years. Red Hat invites utilities, integrators, and vendors to test the reference design in their own labs by reaching out through the original announcement.
