[Info-vax] And another one bites the dust....

[Hans Bachner]

Bill Gunshannon schrieb am 15.02.2022 um 16:46:
> On 2/15/22 10:16, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <j71r42Fh9vsU1 at mid.individual.net>,
>> Bill Gunshannon  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Maybe, but the push seems to be for virtualization and I saw a number
>>> of OpenVMS job announcements that seemed to be production floor systems
>>> which probably can't virtualized.
>>
>> Why not?  There are reasons to virtualize systems on-prem.
>>
> 
> I guess it depends on how you actually communicate with the
> devices on the floor.  When I think of production floor systems
> I think of cables between running machines and computers.
> Probably my PDP-11 past seeping through.

Today, most shop floor equipment communicates over Ethernet. I know of a 
few (rather old) machines which use serial communication, but only with 
an old DECserver - and Ethernet from there to the VMS nodes, using LAT 
or Telnet devices. VMS running under VMware by means of Alpha (in two 
cases VAX) emulation.

In fact, most of the emulators I have touched in the last few years 
[disclaimer: my company is a Stromasys sales and support partner] run in 
virtual machines. Some customers migrated older emulator versions 
running on physical servers to current versions on virtual servers.

So: running OpenVMS in a VMware environment is reality today. I'd 
personally prefer to run OpenVMS natively in a VM (soon), but not 
everyone is able to migrate due to missing source code and/or 3rd party 
software dependencies.

Hans.