pvAccess and virtualisation

At the ISIS accelerators we are migrating to an EPICS control system using the pvAccess protocol, with most of our IOCs and equivalents running in containers. By default, the pvAccess protocol relies on UDP broadcasts for discovery of PVs. Issues that may arise due to this in a containerised environment are discussed, and solutions both general and specific to Docker Swarm are presented. We discuss an open-source UDP broadcast relay tool - called SnowSignal - developed for use internally within our Docker Swarm environments, and the configuration of our PVA Gateways.