Post by Stephen HoffmanPost by Marc Van DyckAnd what about running OpenVMS in a virtual machine on top of HP-UX
running on I4 iron ? Will that be supported ?
Good question. I'd assume not. HP didn't even hint at those HP-UX
HP-VM i4-class configurations in their announcements, nor in the OpenVMS
roadmap.
The content of the customer letter and the roadmap do seem just a little
odd, though. If it had been intended as an EOL — as has clearly been
inferred by a number of folks, and whether correctly or otherwise — the
announcement omitted any discussions of available migration paths, of HP
migration services, and of HP's newer mission-critical x86-64 server
products. I would have expected that information to be included in an
operating system EOL.
All in all, very strange. Accordingly, I'd expect to see some more
information posted in the near future. What that might be, I don't know.
The fact that HP really have not said much almost implies that they will
say something more sooner or later.
However, what they have said is that VMS will not be ported/qualified
for Poulson. Now, what does that mean? It means no new hardware
available two years from now. No new sales. Also, with no porting, and
assuming that customers are happy with Tukwila, can we expect much work
done on other improvements in VMS? Seems unlikely. After all, if HP
assumes customers are going to be happy with old hardware, why would
they not be equally happy with the current status of the software. So it
certainly looks like a moratorium on any new work on VMS. Left are
bugfixes and possibly some new device drivers (although unlikely).
Yes, this is not an official EOL for VMS. HP can wait with that until
2018 without any problems. However, I'd dare say it essentially is the
equivalent to an EOL. With no new hardware there will be preciously
little new sales. And thus, what else than an EOL could it be?
The one *possible* alternative I can see would be if HP decides to go
virtual. Stop Itanium hardware once and for all, and instead ship new
x86 hardware, and then start seriously promote VMS on virtual machines
instead. As I believe Alpha is a much easier architecture to deal with
on a virtual level than Itanium in that case, it could possibly be a
behind the doors return of the Alpha actually.
However, this would very much be mostly catering to existing customers,
as I don't see HP trying to sell this to new users. But it could imply
performance improvements because of hardware improvements over time,
without needing any VMS engineering to work on qualifying any new
hardware. They could just continue emulate existing Alpha hardware on
faster and faster machines.
We'll see...
Johnny
