VAX Users See the Writing on the Wall

Snot Locker writes "An informative piece at ComputerWorld talks about how VAX users are anticipating the costly migration to more modern systems. Several noteworthy tidbits, including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium and the tale of VAX systems that have not had a reboot in 6 years!"

Comments

Don't trash them if you don't have to.

[grub]

If any VAXs admins are reading this and are preparing to send their machines to the landfill, why not check to see if your hardware is on OpenBSD's wanted hardware list? They actively maintain a native VAX port (and it's damn good geek karma!)

Alpha?

[pesc]

Well, most VMS users run on Alpha and has done so since more than ten years. It's not like all VMS users are stuck on VAX and only now has an alternative with Itanium.

Funny, the article does not mention Alphas. Has HP buried that architecture so well?

Re:It must be hard for Windows users to imagine...

[McDutchie]

Where's my "uptime" command for MS Windows?

Right here.

Re:Reliability....Priceless

[gblues]

Not quite.

• It was the University of North Carolina, not a data center.
• It was walled in mistakenly by maintenance workers, not by a remodeling project.
• The server was eventually found by following network cables.

Full article

Nathan

VAX emulators

[emil]

The article mentions SRI's Charon VAX. This is very expensive software that requires a USB dongle for licensing.

However, you can also run VAX VMS on a free i386 VAX emulator called SIMH. I don't seem to be able to get very good ethernet performance with SIMH. However, you can run NetBSD/VAX on it out of the box, and OpenBSD will run with a kernel patch. SIMH also has a PDP-11 emulator and includes images of the original UNIX V7 from AT&T (courtesy of SCaldera). SIMH is an interesting way to run both ancient and modern UNIXen without reformatting your PC.

You can also get free VMS licenses for SIMH/VAX. They must be renewed yearly.

Alpha VMS also supported a VAX binary emulator called VEST, which is mentioned in another post here. Support for VEST is dying, however (modern RDB releases have dropped it). The Charon VAX emulator also runs on Alpha VMS.

Re:VAX emulators

[TheGavster]

The issue with transfering these aged systems to modern hardware under emulation is that people actually took time to optimize the programs, given the limited capabilities of the machines. Thus, emulators usually are not complete enough in their emulation to run the incredibly customized software properly.

Re:Vax versus Google

[afidel]

Uhh, anything with that kind of uptime almost by definition has to be a clustered system. There is too much potential for things like a backplane to fail. Everytime I see an uptime over a couple years it is invariably a VAX or S/390 or other large system sysplex where it is the cluster that has been up and running continuously for that long, not necessarily a single system. Of course the whole point of large systems like those is that you CAN have uniterrupted access to the system for years at a time.