AVTware and Vere Technologies congratulate VMS Software Inc. for successfully negotiating with HP to breathe new life into VMS. The entire VMS community will benefit from their efforts. We continue to partner with Nemonix in offering vtAlpha and vtVAX emulation to legacy customers, and we look forward to working with VSI to bring new solutions and new life to loyal VMS customers.
Let’s add another 35 years to OpenVMS
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VMSbook: the OpenVMS laptop
A wish of many OpenVMS users is to have a notebook that boots VMS instead of Windows/Linux. Something like that would be really great. Alphabook came the closest, but that product no longer exists. Besides it was heavy and expensive.
Being present at the OpenVMS Boot Camp we decided to create just that and make it a prize at the Roundhouse dinner for one of the participants to win. We took a run-of-the-mill HP notebook, removed the Windows software and installed the vtAlpha product instead. We put OpenVMS 8.4 on it with a hobbyist license and configured it to boot up in the X-Windows screen for VMS.
Voila: your one and only personal VMSbook.
We had it on display during the bootcamp and it drew a crowd. People really wanted to participate in the raffle because they could win this thing.
But there could be only one of course.
Contact us if you want to know more about this.
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AVT VMSbook: OpenVMS on X86
Remember the Alphabook that was released by Tadpole in 1996? The first OpenVMS Notebook, meant for the military market?
A great accomplishment at that time, hope for the future of VMS.
A ruggedized, heavy piece of equipment, (under)powered by an Alpha 21066 chip ( 233 Mhz), 128 MB memory and 1 GB disk.
Great at that time, but massively expensive so it didn’t really fly.
However, with vtAlpha you can make a laptop running OpenVMS only. After pressing the power button it opens up in the VMS session manager where you can log into VMS. How about that?
There is probably not a large market for it (Notebook, vtAlpha and OpenVMS licenses add up to quite a bill). OpenVMS developers who like to have such a gem probably don’t have the money for it.
However it could be done, so we did it, as a Proof of Concept. Not really a product but just for fun. An ordinary HP laptop, with vtAlpha installed and OpenVMS with hobbyist license.
It is on display at the OpenVMS Boot Camp 2015, Sept 28 – 30, Nashua
Visit us in the central Boot Camp Lounge and see for yourself.
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VMware Certified
From the early beginning vtAlpha and vtVAX were installable directly on the X86 hardware (Bare Metal), which was a great benefit of this product set. Using the included hypervisor vtServer it was possible to run multiple virtual Alphas and VAXes in parallel on that X86 host.
Support for Virtual Machine installations was also available. VMware, Hyper-V, KVM and Xen are the most popular ones. Our virtual Alpha and VAX products run well on these virtual host infrastructures.
One of our prospects asked if we were VMware certified. Since we didn’t even know such a thing existed we weren’t. So we applied, went through the procedures VMware has in place for this and obtained this certification without a problem.
So from now on we can proudly say: vtAlpha, vtVAX and vtServer are all VMware certified. We made no changes to the products, we only got the certification.
Find more about this here: OpenVMS and Tru64 on X86
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vtAlpha and vtVAX version 2.11 available
Release 2.11 offers the following new features:
- Virtual Fibre Channel Adapters allow the sharing of physical Fibre Channel adapters in the Host computer. Virtual Zoning supported.
- vtAlpha/vtVAX installable and bootable from SAN, allows diskless host systems.
- Support of the EI1000 Gigabit Ethernet adapter in vtAlpha.
- Asian Character Support for virtual AlphaStations (Chinese, Japanese, Korean fonts).
- Management of network License Servers added to the vtMonitor management tool.
- Dynamic volume expansion added to the management interface.
Contact us for more information about these new features.
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Virtualizing Alphas without stopping VMS
We recently completed a project to virtualize a sizeable number of AlphaServers which, during the virtualization process, were relocated to another site without stopping the applications.
The virtualization was routine, but the non-stop aspect was kind of special. This is how we did it:
The starting point was to replace a number of ES45 clusters in the various regional offices of the customer. They wanted to get rid of the old Alpha hardware and move to more modern and standard equipment (x86). There are only two ways to do that: software migration or Alpha virtualization. First they explored the migration option, which caused major stomach-pains across the board. Virtualization was a much more elegant and less complicated way to achieve their goals.
They looked at the alternatives available and decided for vtAlpha: reliable, secure and fast. With HPE ProLiant Blade systems and 3PAR storage as host hardware. vtAlpha hides the architectural differences of the new host environment from the existing Alpha based software. This way they could use a modern 3PAR SAN, even though that isn’t supported by their OpenVMS version.
As mentioned, the virtualization part is easy: install vtAlpha, copy the Alpha disk content to the new hosts, boot from the copied disks and continue to work. However, the regional systems were to be relocated to sites that were about 30 – 50 miles away and everything had to be done without stopping the applications. The customer operation had to continue, a non-stop transition!
The combination of vtAlpha and OpenVMS clustering allowed us to pull this off.
First, we installed vtAlpha on the (centralized) host system, created a virtual equivalent of the AlphaServers to replace, set up a (long-distance) network and FibreChannel link to marry the regional AlphaServers with the central virtual Alpha(s) in a cluster. The OpenVMS shadowing ensured the data was synchronized to the vtAlpha systems. When all data was duplicated, the decentral cluster members were turned off and the vtAlpha cluster continued the operation.
We used HPE Fibre Channel over IP devices to ensure high data transfer speed levels during the shadowing operation, to avoid that user access during that operation would become sluggish because of the distance/latency. After all, an OpenVMS shadow disk operation is only completed when fully executed on all shadowset members, including the ones far, far away.
After some careful planning it was a smooth transition process that we managed to repeat for all the regional offices. The customer is currently running their operation of a fully virtualized vtAlpha environment without any problems. Another happy vtAlpha customer.
Contact us when you like to hear more about this kind of virtualization projects.
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vtAlpha version 3 available
This week we released version 3 of our Alpha and VAX virtualization product. Version 3 contains mainly updates at the vtAlpha side, like increased CPU performance by assigning more resources for Alpha virtualization.
vtAlpha now covers the full range of Alpha computer products, up to the Enterprise Class AlphaServer GS320.
Also added are the virtual equivalents of the EI1000 and DEGXA Gigabit Ethernet adapters that can be found in these bigger Alpha systems.
In version 3 we also introduce a new back-plane for the virtual AlphaServer 2000 and 4000 models to support older OpenVMS and Tru64 releases.
The vtMonitor management interface was modernized as well to support the new functions and reflect the importance of the changes in version 3.
For more information contact your local vtAlpha and vtVAX representative, they will be happy to update you about all the new features.
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AVTware at OpenVMS and Tru64 events
AVTware supports and joins the various OpenVMS en HPE related events across the globe. We have been sponsoring the OpenVMS Bootcamp in Westford, Massachussetts: participated in Oracle Tech Forums throughout USA, Europe and Australia; as well as HPE Discover in Madrid: Here we meet with Alpha and VAX owners, to help them protect their valuable …
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AVTware version 3.2 available
Version 3.2 of vtAlpha/vtVAX virtualization solution offers the following enhancements: Start-up of a virtual Alpha stops when detected that one of the configured console port-numbers is already allocated by another emulator. Virtual tapes for vtAlpha now supports the use of sub-directories MOP v3 and MOP v4 network boot now supported in vtAlpha Allocation of JIT-pages …
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OpenVMS in The Cloud
The OpenVMS and Cloud world have long been seen as very different and not made for each other. Where OpenVMS was designed to drive the (proprietary) hardware directly, the Cloud is a more fluid environment and OpenVMS would not be able to cope with that Cloud-software world really easy. However, under market influence these two …
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