[Info-vax] VSI OpenVMS V9.1 Field Test beginning.

[John H. Reinhardt]

On 7/2/2021 12:37 PM, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <sbnids$4o7$1 at dont-email.me>, "John H. Reinhardt"
> <johnhreinhardt at thereinhardts.org> writes:
> 
>> VSI OpenVMS x86-64 V9.1 only supports SATA disks. Support for other
> disk types will be added in future releases of VSI OpenVMS x86-64.
> 
> I had always assumed that I would have a mixed cluster and add some x86
> disks to shadow sets, then removed the SCSI members and the nodes
> hosting them one by one until everything is new.  If x86 will support
> SCSI, could I plug my Top-Gun Blue 40 MB/s SCSI disks in the Top-Gun
> Blue BA356 boxes into x86?
> 

 From the OpenVMS x86 Release notes:

   2. Hardware Support
   Direct support for x86-64 hardware systems (models to be specified) will be added in later releases.


Not initially.  The current release of FT9.1 only runs on virtual hosts.  While you could probably get a SCSI card to go into whatever machine you use as a virtual host, you'd need some sort of pass thru connection to get those SCSI disks to the OpenVMS virtual machine.  VMware ESXI Enterprise might do that.  I'm pretty positive that Oracle VirtualBox can't.  I don't know about KVM.

So you need to wait until a subsequent release of OpenVMS V9.x to support physical hardware.  Then you'd need a SCSI card that was supported by both the physical hardware and OpenVMS.

It might be a while and then it may depend on what hardware you can get.

The field test V9.1 does support MSCP served disks, however so *iof* you can cluster with an Alpha, then it could serve the disks such that the x86 OpenVMS can access them.

-- 
John H. Reinhardt