[Info-vax] OpenVMS x86-64 and Amazon Web Services EC2 (was: Re: IBM nearing deal to acquire Red Hat)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-04-17 00:40:41 +0000, clair.grant at vmssoftware.com said:

> Let's say I sign up for some compute time with AWS and I need to run my 
> apps on Windows. AWS will give me a VM guest running Windows.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 uses Nitro and allows either a direct 
boot, or booting the hypervisor of your choice.  Microsoft Windows is 
almost certainly not going to be involved.

The hypervisor that EC2 uses is a heavily customized fork of KVM, and 
Nitro uses a custom ASIC on a PCIe controller that offloads various 
tasks, and otherwise operates like bare metal; so-called 
self-virtualizing hardware, or as self-partitioning hardware, depending.

Related reading:

https://www.twosixlabs.com/running-thousands-of-kvm-guests-on-amazons-new-i3-metal-instances/ 

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html
https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english

Some information from some other folks that are supporting another 
operating system on EC2, including how to port an OS to EC2:

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-07-14-port-OS-to-EC2.html
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2018-02-12-FreeBSD-EC2-history.html

There's more information around, of course.

Issues that VSI will probably be looking at here likely include the 
ability for OpenVMS to DHCP boot with a working system and 
DHCP-configured IP network and a working ssh daemon configured and 
running.

It's long, long, long past time for IP to be fully integrated into OpenVMS.




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