[Info-vax] upgrading to VSI VMS---and back

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

I want to upgrade to VSI VMS.  However, I'm worried that---like those
with commercial VSI licenses---at some point licenses will no longer be
available (at reasonable cost).  I am somewhat unusual as a hobbyist in
that I actually bought some commercial licenses back in the day, so if
worst comes to worst I can continue to run a hobbyist cluster (though
only with a couple of small machines with an old version of VMS).  If I
upgrade to VSI with the community license, the only way to fall back on
that would be to restore the old 8.4 system disks.  That would also mean
that any code which makes use of new features would no longer work. 

Something of a compromise would be a mixed HPE/VSI cluster.  I don't 
think that that is supported (probably not much of an issue for a 
hobbyist cluster), but it won't even technically work, right?  That also 
means that a mixed-cluster rolling upgrade won't work, so the upgrade is 
more difficult than usual, and the downgrade as well.

Of course, the ultimate goal is to move to x86, but then going back to 
HPE Alpha would be even more work.

Of course VSI seems enthusiastic about VMS and we all hope that it will 
continue, but people remember DEC disappearing, going from strength to 
non-existence in just a few years, the promise of the 20-year 
development lifetime for Alpha, and so on.