[Info-vax] Do you (or someone you work with) sysman on Windows?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-25 14:00:44 +0000, Jan-Erik Soderholm said:

> ...
> DEC AXPVMS VMS V6.1      Oper System Install    04-MAY-1994
> 
> Not the same physical disk, of course. But same system image that have 
> moved from some RX2x disk to the current IBM DS8000 FRC SAN.
> 
> I don't know it one should expect any problems with this, it works 
> anyway... :-)

With ~twenty years of customizations and tweaks and old workaround and 
left-over settings and the rest, this is probably an irreproducible 
environment.

A development environment like this almost certainly does not match any 
production production, short of cloning development over into 
production.   Cloning a development environment into production should 
be a last-resort operation, given the who-knows-what that is usually 
lurking in a development environment, too.

Do these configurations usually work?  Sure.  Have I used ancient 
environments?  Ayup.  Is reproducibility important for production 
environments?  Definitely.  After having chased "it works fine in 
development" problems a few too many times in production, details like 
keeping a pristine development environment and source control and 
automated deployment gets a whole lot more interesting.

OpenVMS unfortunately makes automated deployments far more painful than 
this process should be for one server, and particularly painful 
deployments when you're rolling out rather more than one server.  I've 
yet to find a clean way to establish network names and network 
addresses for bulk rollouts for instance, short of some rather ugly DCL 
procedure hackery and related customizations.  This given that DHCP 
doesn't work all that well with OpenVMS, and OpenVMS has no way to 
advertise itself as a new and now-manageable host short of local 
customizations — an HP iLO can help here, but there are configuration 
issues in the OpenVMS host environment.

Which gets back to my earlier comments around profiles and related 
mechanisms.  This involves moving away from the traditional "bespoke" 
configurations such as what Jan-Erik appears to be managing, and 
heading toward automated bulk deployments, and toward nuke-and-pave 
processing when the local application requirements shift.  Even in 
smaller environments, this makes for a much faster redeployment of a 
core production server, for instance.

Jan-Erik and a number of existing environments will probably never move 
to clean-install processing, but other folks I'm dealing with are 
interested, and particularly when dealing with more than one.  Once you 
get around to deploying 300 OpenVMS servers, the Old Ways Of Doing 
Things get... annoyingly tedious.  (That deployment number is NOT made 
up nor picked from the air, either.)

As x86-64 gets rolling, there'll be increasing interest in easier 
deployments for OpenVMS, as folks are already used to shuffling their 
VM guests and their servers around.

But back to that earlier comment of mine: nuking and paving gets you a 
reproducible and more easily supportable and more easily recoverable 
environment.   OpenVMS just isn't good at that.  Other operating 
systems are vastly better at it.




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