[Info-vax] VMS port to x86

[Neil Rieck]

For the past 3 months I have been involved in cleaning up a number
(10) of virtualized VAXs. I don't know why everyone uses the term
"virtualized" because these platforms are running on the Charon-VAX
emulation which runs on x86 (well, really the XEON flavor as part of
DL380 but I digress).

p.s. according to the contractors, my employer is running more than 25
of these things

Don't get me wrong, the disk i/o on these beasts is incredibly fast.
And there is something neat about doing a VMS standalone backup
(shutdown VMS; shut down Charon-VAX; then duplicate a Windows-2003
folder by just dragging and dropping). Doing any disk backup or
restore just takes seconds.

But the CPU power is horrible. For example, generating a new set of
1024-bit DSA keys takes 5 minutes on this emulated uVAX-4300 while
less than one second is required on my DS20e Alpha.

Once you buy Charon keys (rumored to be in the range of 8k each; HP is
a authorized reseller so they get a cut); ILO licenses for the CPUs
and SANs; Windows licenses; VMS transfer licenses; the all-in costs of
doing something like this is not cheap.

Why am I saying all this? It seems to me that HP thinks they can keep
OpenVMS alive by selling Charon-VAX and Charon-Alpha emulations (while
making a buck on the side) rather than doing a native x86 port (as it
appears they have done with HP-UX).

This emulation/virtualization technology is not that easy to manage in
a large enterprise as you would think.  In the old days there was only
one group responsible; now there are three (one group is responsible
for all Windows issues; another for the Charon environment; and a
third for VMS).

The whole experience has left me with the feeling of dead-technology-
walking.

If I were HP, I'd have the skunk-works in India working on an x86 port
right now.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/