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

[IanD]

Older versions of esxi are free too. I think it's normally current minus 1 version?

But you need to check the hardware requirements, it strictly only supports certain hardware configurations. Raid cards typically stop most people who try and just use an old PC

I got myself a couple of HP Microservers a while back, put esxi on and then windows and an alpha emulator as ran a small VMS 8.4 hobbyists cluster to play around with. Great for learning about VMware stuff and of course playing around with a VMS cluster was fun

Very good for playing with and learning about stuff. Disk activities were slow (just used SATA drives) and memory limitations of the microserver meant only 2 or 3 VMS systems per microserver. Some of the emulators we're too limited

The nice thing about a microserver was that HP produced esxi images so you didn't have to stuff around with trying to obtain specific drivers. Their esxi imagine contained all the driver's for their microserver

The low power consumption of the microserver meant I just left them on. They booted from USB which eventually became a pita because esxi under certain conditions involving power fluctuations would corrupt the keyboard driver so 1 time in about 20, you would have a boot issue. This setup was about as low budget as one could go so some hiccups were to be expected. But it did get tiresome and now I haven't bothered booting any of it in over 1 1/2 years and now that I don't work with VMS anymore, there's even less incentive. 
I also gave up waiting for VSI to bring out a hobbyist license :-(