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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 1/30/2019 1:57 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?

Other have explained that hypervisor <> emulator.

That still leaves the why question.

Save money.

If you go to a vendor and ask for a small x86-64 server
you will get something like a 1 socket 16 core 32 threads
@ 3 GHz and 128 GB RAM thingy.

If you use that as a single server then most likely
HW utilization will be <5% maybe even <1%.

So you stuff 10-25 virtual servers into this single
physical box.

VMS are no different from Linux or Windows
in this regard.

So you buy one box and run 2 VMS instances,
1 big Linux instance with 10 containers,
5 other Linux instances and 5 Windows instances.

Or something like that.

Arne