[Info-vax] free shell accounts?

[dodecahedron99 at gmail.com]

On Sunday, January 18, 2015 at 7:02:42 AM UTC+11, Stan Radford wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have been lurking on this newsgroup for awhile and would like to try my
> hand at VMS but I don't have any hardware. I realize I could run a version
> on SIMH but I want to try to see what I am getting into before I do that and
> running on real hardware is always the best way to go. I ordered a few books
> that will hopefully arrive soon and would like to ask: are there any free
> shell providers for VMS so I could see what this is all about?
> 
> Is there any graphical desktop and will it work over normal X-forwarding
> from a shell account or is everything command line? I am fine with command
> line but a GUI is sometimes easier when using a shell account especially if
> they only allow you to sign on once because then it's harder to be in an
> editor and read man pages etc. unless Emacs is running there.
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Stan Radford

Some of the emulators are very good, even production ready

If you want to go the emulator route you can do something along the lines of what I have done, all for no cost (or very little)

Originally I installed a vm host (vmware workstation but virtualbox works just as well) on my laptop (fairly beefy laptop with 16gb ram but in the past I had it running on a laptop with 4gb of ram - it's too slow but an 8gb ram equipped laptop should be fine)). I used a Windows XP instance I had and installed personal alpha on it, which I have now ditched and gone with emuvm, which I have found to be very reliable. Emuvm also support linux and they now have an alpha emulator for bsd that's in test. If you use linux as your host vm, then it's zero cost, otherwise your up for a windows licence possibly

Then swing over to the vms hobbyists program and get the licence keys and access to the Alpha cd's via download. You will need to register with one of the required support groups first though as it's a requirement of the hobbyist program

Yes, the emulators are fairly slow but good enough for getting a feel. Part of the fun of OpenVMS is learning the management side of it, for that your going to need to have full control of a machine - hence why I went with the emulator option

If you want to go further into clustering for cheap, you could do what I did and get yourself a cheap hp microserver and load it up with either 8 gb or ram or 16 gb of ram (older models supported 8gb but work with 16 gb, new ones officially support 16 gb). These boxes are dirt cheap but do lack somewhat on the cpu side. They are also vmware complaint being an hp server. HP also put out updates to the vmware image for esxi that includes all the necessary drivers, making things easier

On this microsever, I run the hp esxi vmware 5 image (free, you get the licence from vmware) and have run up 3 OpenVMS 8.4 instances and had them in a cluster with shadowed disks across all. If your going to do this, then get yourself an ssd as I found normal disk drives to be fairly slow. In terms of cpu, 3 OpenVMS instances is really the limit of these little hp microservers

Yes, it's double virtualised but I have 2 of these microservers and the goal was to eventually play with vms under vmware and see how well it handles being live migrated between the two. Alas, I have not got that far and now one of the microservers has been commissioned on another task and is unlikely ever to join it's vmware partner :-(

Hope you enjoy what you discover with OpenVMS, it's a great OS and hopefully with the new company taking it over, will expand it's horizons a lot further