[Info-vax] Rendez-vous autour de VMS" of January 31 2023 report

[John Dallman]

In article <tsq2vo$3utev$1 at dont-email.me>, jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com
(Jan-Erik Söderholm) wrote:

> English version of the meeting notes:

The license news is good. The ADA news is not, but is hardly unexpected. 

Bare metal is a question of market segments, as far as I understand it.
Enterprise IT shops in the US tend to be strongly in favour of
virtualising everything. What is the compelling use case for bare metal? 

The costs of bare metal are considerable, since x86 hardware has a vast
range of designs. There are probably 50-100 times more x86-64 server
designs than the total numbers of Alpha and Itanium server designs
produced by DEC, Compaq and HP for running VMS. Supporting it requires
writing enormous numbers of VMS device drivers, a skill that is not at
all common today. The VSI staff who can do it can do other things which
will be more valuable to the company. 

Running under virtualisation needs only a few VMS device drivers. The
actual hardware is managed by device drivers for the virtualisation
software. Those are written by the hardware manufacturers so that
virtualisation software can be run on their machines. Those hardware
manufacturers are not going to start writing VMS device drivers unless
VMS becomes /much/ more widely used. 

This view may seem negative, but it reflects the commercial reality that
VSI need to cope with. 

John