[Info-vax] OpenVMS on x86 and Virtual Machines -- An Observation

[Craig A. Berry]

On 1/30/19 12:57 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <8f9a7157-ac0c-4471-a725-ce52ffa4a86c at googlegroups.com>,
> gezelter at rlgsc.com writes:
> 
>> Traditionally, OpenVMS has been run on dedicated hardware.
> 
>> With the advent of OpenVMS on x86, there is an increasing discussion of
>> running OpenVMS x86 on various virtual machine hypervisors
> 
> Since VMS will soon run natively on x86, what is the motivation to run
> it on some sort of emulator?

A hypervisor is not an emulator.  As far as why run on a virtual
machine, it's the same reason that most instances of most operating
systems that run natively on x86 these days run on virtual machines.
Mostly configuration and management flexibility, some DR operations,
etc.  VMS would only be different where it lacks capabilities to take
advantage of the virtualization environment.