[Info-vax] Attn VSI employees: Viable full system Itanium emulator for VMS ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-02-17, John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
> In article <sulkdg$6eu$1 at dont-email.me>,
> clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) wrote:
>
>> Given that VSI are in partnership with HPE, perhaps VSI could get
>> access to the source code to find out how viable that could be ?
>> 
>> Can someone else offer their own opinion ?
>
> I think you're being quite optimistic here. Portable HP-UX is not in
> evidence nowadays, so it was presumably postponed, cancelled or renamed.
>

Around here, I am not used to being called "quite optimistic". :-)

> I've done a little digging into the virtualisation offerings for
> Integrity machines, and could not find anything that looked like a
> descendent, so it doesn't seem to have been renamed AFAICS. 
>
> Postponement is possible, but the logical time to restart the beta would
> have been when Itanium shipments ended in 2021. That does not seem to
> have happened. 
>
> So it would appear to have been cancelled. 
>

The reasons could be business/management related instead of technical.

Given that VSI has absolutely no solution for emulating Itanium
systems on other architectures, it might be worth a look by them
if it helps keep a few customers until x86-64 VMS is finally ready
and has been in production long enough to be trusted generally.

Forcing customers to go back from Itanium to Alpha so they can run
as emulated systems on modern hardware is not a good situation for
VSI to be placing potential customers in, given what those potential
customers might end up doing instead if they are placed in that position.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.