VAX Users See the Writing on the Wall

Snot Locker writes "An informative piece at ComputerWorld talks about how VAX users are anticipating the costly migration to more modern systems. Several noteworthy tidbits, including hints of the port of OpenVMS to Itanium and the tale of VAX systems that have not had a reboot in 6 years!"

Don't trash them if you don't have to.

[grub]

If any VAXs admins are reading this and are preparing to send their machines to the landfill, why not check to see if your hardware is on OpenBSD's wanted hardware list [openbsd.org]? They actively maintain a native VAX port (and it's damn good geek karma!)

Alpha?

[pesc]

Well, most VMS users run on Alpha and has done so since more than ten years. It's not like all VMS users are stuck on VAX and only now has an alternative with Itanium.

Funny, the article does not mention Alphas. Has HP buried that architecture so well?

Re:It must be hard for Windows users to imagine...

[McDutchie]

Where's my "uptime" command for MS Windows?

Right here [microsoft.com].

Re:Reliability....Priceless

[gblues]

Not quite.

• It was the University of North Carolina, not a data center.
• It was walled in mistakenly by maintenance workers, not by a remodeling project.
• The server was eventually found by following network cables.

Full article [theregister.co.uk]

Nathan

VAX emulators

[emil]

The article mentions SRI's Charon VAX. This is very expensive software that requires a USB dongle for licensing.

However, you can also run VAX VMS on a free i386 VAX emulator called SIMH [trailing-edge.com]. I don't seem to be able to get very good ethernet performance with SIMH. However, you can run NetBSD/VAX on it out of the box, and OpenBSD will run with a kernel patch. SIMH also has a PDP-11 emulator and includes images of the original UNIX V7 from AT&T (courtesy of SCaldera). SIMH is an interesting way to run both ancient and modern UNIXen without reformatting your PC.

You can also get free VMS licenses [montagar.com] for SIMH/VAX. They must be renewed yearly.

Alpha VMS also supported a VAX binary emulator called VEST [uruk.org], which is mentioned in another post here. Support for VEST is dying, however (modern RDB releases have dropped it). The Charon VAX emulator also runs on Alpha VMS.

Re:Alpha?

[dekemoose]

IIRC, HP didn't bury that architecture, Compaq buried it prior to the acquisition.

Re:It must be hard for Windows users to imagine...

[Computerguy5]

I just used it on Windows XP Professional without trouble. YMMV

Intermediate step: SIMH

[Kurt Granroth]

In an enterprise environment (where VAXen are most often used), it's not feasible to just drop the architecture and switch to another. The amount of code running on the VAX is likely massive and no, it doesn't easily translate into code that works on Unix systems.

A good intermediate step in any migration is to use the SIMH simulator (http://simh.trailing-edge.com [trailing-edge.com]). SIMH can simulate quite a few systems (including a VAX) at the CPU level. As you may expect, this involves emulating every single CPU instruction... not a very efficient way to run code! However, its saving grace is that modern processors are very fast and old VAX systems are not. Depending on how old your VAX hardware is, you might find that an emulated VAX running on a newer P4/Xeon/Athlon/Opteron will be faster than the stock VAX!

This doesn't solve the migration problem but it does allow you to run your old code on modern easily-fixable and readily-available hardware. Beats having to get all of your parts off of eBay.

Ironically.... Windows NT/2k is VMS's Child

[HighOrbit]

When Digital fired most of its VMS team in a cost cutting frenzy, Mirosoft had the good sense to hire them up. David N. Cutler who was the VMS project leader became the NT project leader at MS. Cutler brought most of his team with him. The result was that NT was in many ways a clone of VMS with a Win32 API and Win16 API layer on top. The story is famous and is told here [winnetmag.com].

Re:Vax versus Google

[afidel]

Uhh, anything with that kind of uptime almost by definition has to be a clustered system. There is too much potential for things like a backplane to fail. Everytime I see an uptime over a couple years it is invariably a VAX or S/390 or other large system sysplex where it is the cluster that has been up and running continuously for that long, not necessarily a single system. Of course the whole point of large systems like those is that you CAN have uniterrupted access to the system for years at a time.

Re:MicroVax

[VAXcat]

If it's got VMS loaded, cracking the root password is no sweat at all. Ya do a converstional boot (this is done differently on different MicroVaxen, usually b/1 or b/r5:1 on themore common ones at the >>> power on prompt). Then, when you get the prompt, SET /STARTUP OPA0:, and SET WRITESYSPARAMS 0, and then CONTINUE. VMS will boot with the console as the startup file. At the $ prompt, type SPAWN, then at the next prompt, @SYS$SYSTEM:STARTUP. The system will be fully up and you will be logged in as SYSTEM, full privs. Ya then gotta run sys$system:authorize, and create yerself an account. This is in the VMS FAQ, so I'm not giving away any secrets here.. If it's running some UNIX variant, I got no idea...

Re:Vax versus Google

[hearingaid]

(1) is not the answer. VAX clusters are groups of machines that share a lot of resources (most commonly, hard drives; even then, RAID arrays are popular in the bigger systems). Believe me, VMS' impressive uptime figures (and they're still very impressive) are largely because of (2).

Re:Migration to more expensive hardware

[funwithBSD]

Wrong. Rolling upgrades. Don't need to take down the entire cluster to do an upgrade, and that is the uptime stat.

Re:Ah, the VAX... I miss it.

[bcrowell]

VMS was actually a nice system in many ways. The file system had versioning built in, which was really convenient. I liked the way the error messages were all formatted so they began with unique identifiers like %STARWARS-E-SILICONMELTED, so you could look up the message in the documentation to find out more about it. File versioning may be an example of how the Unix filesystem has become sort of the bare-bones de facto standard for the internet, which is kind of a shame, because in some ways it's impoverished.

Systems dudes I worked with also thought VMS's real-time features beat the **** out of Unix, but I'm not an expert on that.

Do science labs still run VMS on alphas, or are they going the way of the dinosaur?

VAX/VMS 4 Eva

[kmhebert]

Ha, this brings me back. My first post-graduation job was for a VAX/VMS to Solaris migration. This ancient VAX had spent years processing satellite telemetry data for the U.S. government. I learned a lot about how to migrate old data into a new data structure and just generally how to get an old system to talk to a newer one. The VAX did a great job at storing and processing data but they wanted to upgrade that part of the process so that it would be compatible with some of the newer UNIX software they had built. Of course, since this was government work, the project was scrapped after several years of paying very expensive salaries in favor of supporting the VAX/VMS based system. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that they are still using the old VAX for the exact same purpose today.

Re:Six Years?

[Spinlock_1977]

I don't know this particular facility, but the usual components would be: 1) two-node (minimum) OpenVMS cluster, a UPS for the computer room (perhaps more than 1), dual redundant air conditioning systems, multiple WAN connections from different providers over physically separate media, and dual generators for longer-term power outages. Why 2 generators? That's the homework assignment.

Re:Strange Cousins

[myg]

Actually, Cutler himself admits to the VMS+1=WNT thing. In addition, NT originally stood for N-Ten, which was the codename of the i860 RISC processor from Intel. Back then it was dubbed a "Cray on a Chip"; that was NT's original target although Dave always intended to keep the system portable.

In the end, the i860 turned out to be not such a good idea and they moved NT to MIPS -- a chip preferred by Cutler -- as well as familiar to some of the ex-digital crew since I believe Cutler had managed the compiler group for the MIPS-Based DECStations.

The picture in the article..

[deacon]

Is the inside of a air cooled VAX 9000 [google.com] .

There was originally a water cooled version, but by using heatsinks that look like a bed of nails, and ducting the cooling air from a blower in the bottom of the unit to impinge individually on each heatsink ( the ducting is removed in the pic ) it was possible to ditch all the water cooling hardware.

These systems were meant for raised floor installations where chilled air was blown up thru missing floor panels, right into the fan intake.

And that is not a real service guy... he does not have a static strap!

It's kind of strange that the article makes no mention of HP Remarketing, which still provides parts and support.

Re:VAX emulators

[TheGavster]

The issue with transfering these aged systems to modern hardware under emulation is that people actually took time to optimize the programs, given the limited capabilities of the machines. Thus, emulators usually are not complete enough in their emulation to run the incredibly customized software properly.

Re:It must be hard for Windows users to imagine...

[chickenmonger]

Try the "systeminfo" command. This will give you, among other things, the system uptime. This works on Windows XP, but it may not on previous Windows'.

Re:It must be hard for Windows users to imagine...

[Kardamon]

::choke, cough, gasp:: Did you say DOS 4?! Ugh.

Maybe the grandparent poster means the preemptive real-mode multitasking DOS 4 [osnews.com] which was created by MS but never shipped.