[Info-vax] OpenVMS x86 on VMWare Fusion

[Craig A. Berry]

I mentioned in another thread that I got OpenVMS x86 working on VMWare
Fusion, the free version of their hypervisor for macOS hosts. If you
want to buy an expensive product from VMWare, you certainly should and
it will likely have all the knobs and switches you need to set up a
virtual machine just like the VSI installation guide tells you to.

The free Fusion does not have all the necessary settings in its
interface, but seems to work by editing its settings file as follows.

Locate the the .vmx file by right-clicking on your .vmwarevm file and
choosing "Show Package Contents." Open the .vmx file in a text editor.

Add the following line, or, if the line is already present with a TRUE
setting, change it to FALSE:

   scsi0:0.present = "FALSE"

Without that, you'll get a failed boot due to a SCSI driver mismatch
even with no attached SCSI devices, or at least I did.

You *may* get the following line by default if you choose "Other 64-bit"
as the machine type, but if you don't you'll need to set it:

   firmware = "efi"

Whatever the default ethernet device is, it doesn't work with VMS, so
you'll need to add this line:

   ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"

The Fusion options for serial support only allow logging to a file,
which isn't going to work if you need an interactive console, such as
for setting up your network the first time.  The following gets you a
serial console to which you can connect with "telnet localhost 2023":

   serial0.present = "TRUE"
   serial0.fileType = "network"
   serial0.fileName = "0.0.0.0:2023"
   serial0.network.endPoint = "server"
   serial0.startConnected = "TRUE"

I'm sure this is all unsupported by VMWare. And every time you change
the settings via the GUI, it tends to overwrite the non-default settings
that are not supported by the GUI, so be prepared to make these changes
again.  But free is good, and the results seem to be acceptable so far.