[Info-vax] VMS - what is the current thinking amongst the user community

[David J Dachtera]

Jon.Power at sector7.com wrote:
> 
> It been a long time since I posted anything - Sector7 has been working
> away at migrating various applications - not much change there - We
> are releasing 3.3 of the migration libraries - which provide full
> duplex asynchronous I/O, AST's (supervisor, kernel, user etc) - and
> has tested at doing over 50,000 lock conversion per second on some old
> Intel equipment.
> 
> So much for the bits and bytes - Obviously, the projects we see these
> days are no longer the 'low hanging fruit' - we are - as always -
> focused on complex code migrations - I would be very interested in
> understanding what the VMS users "feel about" VMS. We seem to be
> seeing large corporations with UNIX as the focus - that have a VMS
> server / cluster that is working perfectly - but - represents a very
> small percentage of the organizations skill set - and yet is as
> mission critial as any other server.
> 
> We wont be soliciting / calling or even emailing - but - If anyone
> feel so inclined I'd especially like to hear:
> 
> (a) Is your VMS system running mainly home grown application or
> packaged
> (b) If homegrown - are there any specific VMS API/ Subsystems - that
> make VMS irreplaceable (lock manager, clustering etc)
> (c) Is there any 'software' that would make life easier - I hate to
> use the DEC I14Y "Interoperability" - only because - I still miss
> DECUS / New Orleans and the TGV guys paying a for several great nights
> out.
> (d) Is there still the religious fervor associated with VMS? (after
> having to duplicate the AST/QIO/Lock Manager mechanisms - I have even
> a greater appreciation of VMS internals)
> (e) What programming languages are popular ? (no one has asked for
> BASIC or DIBOL for 2 or 3 years)
> (f) If VMS was going to be replaced - as VMS guys - what target would
> you lean toward (AIX/HPUX/LINUX/Solaris x86)
> 
> I appreciate anyone taking the time to read this.
> 
> Sincerely

Hey! Gib Senip! Long time, no read! Looks like life at reknaw.com is
going well...

Y'know, there is one market niche I believe you are missing out on:

AIX(, UX, Linux, etc.) needs something akin to VMScluster. HACMP is not
"clustering", it's fail-over detection and initiation, at best.

Since the healthcare industry is migrating away from VMS as you read
this (HP went out and pushed UX on I64 instead of VMS; the ISVs read
that as "VMS is EOL"), and many sites are moving their Cerner and
InterSystems software to AIX, even the less technical Cerner, etc.
people are finding the lack of VMS-style clustering to be the bane of
their UN*Xland existence.

One of the sorest points is the lack of any functionality approaching
the "DO" command of VMS's SYSMAN utility. Action that used to be done
once are now done repeatedly, consuimg vastly more time than before, and
introducing lots and lots of opportunity for error.

For example, we have 6 production LPARs and four in development. Done
"the long way", a task as simple as adding a printer to the backend
would take seven(7) (your favorite number?) separate printer adds, and
that doesn't even account for having multiple development environments
(add another nine(9) or so separate actions). (I've managed to work
around that. I add printers to AIX once in Dev., once in Prod. and into
Millennium once in prod. which is then propagated (queue.def and
queue.cfg) to the other three prod LPARs and to the environment-specific
paths on the three dev. LPARs that do printing.)

So, if you actually have a functional DLM, the next step is the o.s.
hooks to enable storage sharing they way we can in a VMScluster, though
perhaps modifying "mount" to accept a "--cluster" command line option
(or equiv.) may not be entirely practical in UN*Xland. Check it out...

...from MY perspective as a systems guy.

D.J.D.