VMSHardware

VMS Hardware

VMS runs natively on selected VAX, Alpha, and Itanium systems. Emulators for VAX and Alpha are available for other platforms.

New hardware is only known to be available for Itanium systems.

If you just want to play with VMS, start out with an emulator, and do research before acquiring the hardware.

This article is mainly oriented to hobbyists that are trying to get started using used hardware on a limited budget.

You should also read the OpenVMS FAQ.

Yes, I know that you may have got your VAX/Alpha free. While you may have gotten lucky, in many cases, you may find that it is cheaper to just replace it completely than to make it into a usable system running VMS. However you may find that a used dealer might actually give you something for that old system. Or maybe not. You can usually find someone that will take it off your hands for free. But keep reading.

As VMS systems are used in many mission critical applications for companies, the prices for some used computer equipment are Upside Down. What this means is that many used items have prices much higher than they should have based on the performance of the device or the availability of superior lower priced replacement parts.

It also means that a dealer who has customers that are running the very obsolete parts may be in some cases be willing to trade superior used parts for the inferior parts that you got for free.

TODO: We need a WIKI page to get contributions of the VUPS of actual VMS hardware and emulators. This is needed to determine at what point an emulator will give superior performance to older physical hardware.

It looks like the SimH emulator on a 4 Ghz X686 CPU might be able to get around 6 VUPs, but I have not confirmed this.

IA64 Hardware

From time to time IA64 hardware that can run VMS comes on sale for low prices. If you are buying from a dealer, you may find that they can provide both CPU and memory upgrades for low cost at the time of purchase. The main drawback is that the controllers usually only support Utra SCSI drives that are still pretty expensive.

There are some reports online that one of the Smart Array SATA controllers can be made to work on OpenVMS IA64. However the prices of those controllers from dealers appears to still be relatively high from my checks.

Also there are Ultra SCSI to SATA adapters available. These are also still rather pricey, but still may be cheaper than an Ultra SCSI drive.

There are no known Itanium emulators available for download that can boot VMS. HP has made the SKI Emulator that they once used available under the
GNU Public License V2.

Alpha Hardware

A lot of Alpha hardware is available. The big issue that will usually affect you is memory. Most Alphas will use SCSI disk drives, and a few will use IDE drives. USB is not supported on most models, but many USB PCI cards have been found to work.

Only USB-1 is currently implemented. It is unknown if USB-2 will ever get implemented.

As Alpha and Integrity support a common code base, it is currently unknown if the Smart Array SATA controller hack would work with an Alpha.

IDE support is limited to about 120 GB. Apparently going beyond that requires UDMA support. UDMA requires the higher density cable and limits the signal length from the controller to the device. VMS compatible Alpha hardware was never designed to support UDMA, and it is currently unknown if any VMS compatible Alpha configuration meets the UDMA specification. Earlier versions of the IDE driver have been published as an example driver, so it might be possible for a driver to be hacked by a hobbyists. The problem is that IDE drives are being replaced by SATA in the commodity marketplace, so that it may be hard to find IDE drives long term.

Some ALPHAs take proprietary memory that may be hard to find.

Others will use standard parity SIMS. The problem there is that most systems did not use parity SIMS. The best source of cheap 32M SIMS that I have found in the past were old x86 servers. That is servers, not desktop systems. I have not seen affordable 64 M parity SIMS ever, but it has been quite a few years since I have looked.

Most newer Alphas will take DIMMs, but those DIMMs may need to be specially qualified for that model of Alpha. While I have seen third party memory used, it was memory that the vendor stated would work on that model. I have not seen reports of generic memory being used.

So essentially with a used Alpha, you need to pay attention on how much memory that it comes with and how hard it will be to add memory to it, and what types of disks that you will have on it.

One system that comes up used sometimes is a Multia. The Multia is only know to boot a small number of VMS releases and is sensitive to a failure known as heat death. Most of the I/O options on a Multia do not work on VMS.

There are several commercial emulators for the Alpha that will boot VMS, and several of the vendors have versions that are free for Hobbyists to use. Some of the free emulators require periodic reboots.

PersonalAlpha as well as other emulator freeware is available from Stromasys.

FreeAXP emulator from Migration Specialties. This now appears to be a limited version of the
Avanti Commercial Emulator from Migration Specialties.

AlphaVM-free emulator from EMUVM.COM.

There is one known open source ES40 emulator that may be able to boot VMS.

VAX Hardware

There is quite a bit of VAX hardware out there used. However much of it is of little value to hobbyists.

There are also several commercial emulators and at least one open source emulator SimH.

Generally if you want actual VAX hardware, you will need to become an expert as maintaining it. That is beyond the scope of this article.

If you want to do VAX development, the first step now is to set up a VAX on SimH if you do not have a VMS system or Infoserver that can be used for a network boot. Set up that VAX system to be a LAVC boot member.

CD-ROM is also an option for install, if you can find a VAX with a CD-ROM drive. If your VAX does not have a bootable SCSI controller, then will need to do a network install.

Then you will want a VAX that can boot from the network. That pretty much eliminates all the VAX 7xx, and 86xx models and the MicroVAX I.

For Q-Bus based VAX, you need either an embedded ethernet or a DELQA card, not a DEQNA card.
The VAX 4000 series has embedded ethernet, and so does a MicroVAX 3400 system.

It may cost you more to acquire a DELQA than it costs to acquire a complete faster system that can run VMS. Or you might get lucky.

Now also, anything that is slower than 5 VUPs, will likely be slower than your Sim-H VAX emulator. That means the MicroVAX/VAXstation II, 35xx, 38xx, and most of the 31xx series.

So what you want is hardware that you can easily maintain, which means that along with a bootable network adapter, it needs to have SCSI disk drives.

One item to avoid is the VAXstation 3100 line and some MicroVAX 3100 models. The boot firmware can only support 1 GB SCSI disk drives. (www.hoffmanlabs.com)

Memory is also a configuration. It may be hard and expensive to add memory to your system, more than the cost of completely replacing the system. This is a common theme, and now you may know why you got that hardware for free. But you may get lucky at finding parts.

VAX/VMS can usually run well with as little of 8M of memory with careful tuning, but generally you will want more. More is better.

The MicroVAX line has variants known as VAXserver and VAXstation. The VAXServer and VAXstation where models that VMS was originally coded to only allow a console and a single login on. That restriction was removed with later versions of VMS. VAXstations have graphics hardware on them. For the purposed of this article a MicroVAX, VAXserver, or VAXstation are all the same.

Aside from SCSI drives, which can still be obtained, some other disk drive types were used. They have not been made for a while, and will likely cost more than they are worth to a hobbyist to replace, as used drives are likely to fail at any moment.

RD53/RD54 drives. Basically these are probably of more value to used dealers than to anyone. They have low capacity, they are extremely slow, and they are the most expensive drive options. Used dealers still want these for commercial sites that do not want to risk the far cheaper transparent upgrade options below. A complete used MicroVAX 31xx with at least a 1 GB of disk space or better can probably be purchased for less than what an RD54 currently sells for. Actually many people have spent less buying used RX2600 systems.

ESDI drives. Basically most people who understood the Q-BUS configuration would install a third party ESDI drive in the early MicroVAXes and used this instead of the RD series drives. This gives at least 2 to 3 times the performance of RD54, far more than twice the capacity, and a drive and controller could be purchased for far less than an RD54 drive.
And you can probably still purchase a complete and better equipped MicroVAX 3100 than an ESDI drive and combination.

DSSI drives. These are a proprietary interconnect that is similar to SCSI. These may be hard to find and require either an internal DSSI controller or a KFQSA controller.
I suspect that replacing a drive of any size will cost quite a bit. The newer drive models gave great performance relative to their age. These drives can be shared between 3 hosts in a VMS cluster.

There were DSSI to SCSI adapters available. The last time I checked used prices, again, they were still very pricy as compared to alternatives.

SDI drives. These are the RA series drives and need a KDA50 controller. These where high performance relative to their age. Again, replacing them will be likely expensive, and the older drives took up a lot of space and used a bit of power. These drives can be connected to two controllers, but only one controller can access the disk at one time.

Q-BUS SCSI MSCP adapters. These are only available for the VAX through third parties, and are still pricy. These are nice because they make the SCSI disks look like an RA series drive as they look like a KDB50 controller that can support 7 devices. Some devices could only support disks and some could only support tapes.

The KZQSA adapter. This is a SCSI to Q-BUS adapter that is bootable only on some MicroVAX 3500s and newer systems. They apparently are hard to find and expensive.

Some of the VAX 4000 series have built in SCSI adapter support. VAX 4000-50, VAX 4000-1xx, and the VAXstation line. The VAX 31xx series also all support SCSI.

But you do not need any disks, you can run as a diskless satellite to another VMS system.
Like a SimH system that has 1 TB SATA or USB volumes on it.

PersonalVAX as well as other emulator freeware is available from Stromasys.

SimH is an open source general purpose processor emulator. Besides VAX there are implementations of at least the following:

• Data General Nova, Eclipse
• Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1, PDP-4, PDP-7, PDP-8, PDP-9, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-15, VAX
• GRI Corporation GRI-909, GRI-99
• IBM 1401, 1620, 1130, 7090/7094, System 3
• Interdata (Perkin-Elmer) 16b and 32b systems
• Hewlett-Packard 2114, 2115, 2116, 2100, 21MX, 1000
• Honeywell H316/H516
• MITS Altair 8800, with both 8080 and Z80
• Royal-Mcbee LGP-30, LGP-21
• Scientific Data Systems SDS 940
• SWTP 6800

VMS systems can also NFS serve and mound NFS exports when a TCP/IP program is installed.

TODO: Is to start adding links to pages about VMS hardware configuration.