[Info-vax] VMS First-Boot on x86 Contest

[Neil Rieck]

On Tuesday, November 21, 2017 at 2:29:20 AM UTC-5, Paul Sture wrote:
> On 2017-11-15, Jan-Erik Soderholm <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote:
> > Den 2017-11-15 kl. 16:22, skrev Bill Gunshannon:
> >> On 11/15/2017 10:07 AM, Jan-Erik Soderholm wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Maybe one should attend the HP-Connect Sweden VMS-SIG meeting next
> >>> week before guessing the first boot date... :-)
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> 09:00 - 09:30 Registration and coffee
> >>> 09:30 - 09:40 Welcome. Anders Johansson
> >>> 09:40 - 10:30 HPE HW. x86- och Itanium. HPE.
> >>> 10:30 - 11:15 OpenVMS roadmaps.
> >>> 11:15 - 12:00 Micro Focus. Offerings and support questions. Micro Focus
> >>> 12:00 - 13:30 Lunch.
> >>> 13:30 - 14:30 State of the port to x86. Clair Grant, VMS Software Inc
> >>> 14:30 - 15:15 Early stages of the boot. Booting/Crashing. Maybe with demo.
> >>> 15:15 - 15:45 Coffee
> >>> 15:45 - 16:30 New FS and VMS Calling standard på x86.
> >>> 16:30 - 16:50 New training offereings from VSI. HPE
> >>> 16:50 - 17:00 Roundup
> >> 
> >> Just curious.  What does MicroFocus have to do with VMS?
> >> It would seem to me that they are pushing products that
> >> require leaving VMS.
> >> 
> >> bill
> >> 
> >
> > I guess there was something in the HPE portfolio included in the
> > "HPE software" merger with MicreoFocus that was for OpenVMS, not?
> >
> 
> When I was looking for the HPE ILO patches the other day, Suse
> Enterprise was featured prominently on one of the pages, with a 60 day
> free trial on offer.  Curious, I signed up for that, and the download
> offered was from a MicroFocus host.
> 
> I chickened out at the prospect of a 3.5 GB download for "DVD 1",
> followed by another for "DVD 2" at 6.5GB. -)
> 
> -- 
> Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough to
> have a totally separate environment to run production in.

Yeah, I think HP now owns 51% of SuSE through their spin/merger with Micro Focus. 

During the summer of 2016 I downloaded and played with various versions of Linux (Gentoo, SuSE, Debian, and CentOS) for Itanium. Gentoo was the most fun but everything is compiled from sources so the install is painfully long.

A short time later I acquired a used DL-380. That month I was evaluating CentOS but the RAID was so old that I could only install CentOS-6. Then a month after that I acquired two DL-385 and was able to install CentOS-7.2 which appeared to be an order of magnitude better than CentOS-6.

I should point out that it was only my intention to play with Linux so I could test out a few things with MariaDB-10 which it not yet available on OpenVMS. We were running "MariaDB-5.5 on OpenVMS" at the time so for these tests we just directed the connect string to the remote (CentOS-7) platform. The performance was so damned good that we set up a second box for PROD then moved our data out to it. Our primary business system is still hosted on OpenVMS running on an Itanium.

Linux is more feature-rich than OpenVMS but is much more difficult to use. And without a support contract, you are subject to the bad advice and misinformation found on the self-help blogs. You will be supporting yourself.

p.s. a full copy of CentOS-7.x can be burned to a single DVD.

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_linux.html