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

[Dave Froble]

On 2/20/2023 12:44 PM, ultr... at gmail.com wrote:
> On Saturday, February 18, 2023 at 5:41:04 AM UTC-5, John Dallman wrote:
>> In article <tsq2vo$3utev$1... at dont-email.me>, jan-erik.... 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
>
> how about so software developers can write apps for small and mid size customers who don't want to run virtual ...
>
> they don't have to support all x86 platforms how about just one like HP bladeservers they are doing now?
>
> WITHOUT A BARE METAL PLATFORM AND LIMITING OPENVMS TO VIRTUAL PLATFORMS ONLY, IT WILL NEVER GROW ...
>

Bob's back ....

Would a single x86 configuration be sufficient?  I doubt it.

Otherwise, VSI would have to provide device drivers for many devices, and that 
just ain't going to happen.

At least one thing a VM environment does is provide device drivers for selected 
environments, and not even VMs support all possible devices.  So using a VM an 
OS does not have to worry about device drivers, or other issues trying to work 
on "bare metal".

In the x86 world, I doubt anybody supports all possible devices.  Just too many, 
and constantly changing.

I don't really like the added layer of a VM, but I do realize, in the x86 world, 
it is the least bad of a bunch of bad options.  VMs also have some good features.

-- 
David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc.      E-Mail: davef at tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA  15486