INFO-VAX Mon, 23 Jun 2008 Volume 2008 : Issue 348 Contents: Re: Does anyone know if and how VMS figured in this? OT: Carly as VP? Re: OT: Carly as VP? Re: To those who may be interested - OpevVMS Cobol Opportunity Re: VAM Hobbyist RE: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Re: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Re: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) RE: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Re: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) RE: VMS layered products paper documentation updates problem ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:48:29 -0700 (PDT) From: yyyc186 Subject: Re: Does anyone know if and how VMS figured in this? Message-ID: <7c7dbeb1-5c89-4a24-99ab-0dce9c675648@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com> On Jun 15, 8:25=A0pm, moro...@world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) wrote: > So VMS "figures into this" by not being selected for the job. NASDAQ and a few other trading firms broke away from OpenVMS because various big wigs in the organizations owned stock in either MS or some Eunics company. Since then, there have been "make CNN" type outages. When the big wigs at the trading companies are allowed to purchase products from companies they own stock in, rather than products which give their customers good service, you have a recipe for corruption which makes the current mortgage scandal look small time. How quickly they forget the lessons of Sept. 11. Those trading companies using a distributed OpenVMS cluster continued trading through the end of business. Those using either Windows or HP/UX went out of business. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:26:59 -0400 From: "John Smith" Subject: OT: Carly as VP? Message-ID: <1f917$485edab1$4c0aab67$28990@TEKSAVVY.COM> http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11258.html ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:52:38 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: OT: Carly as VP? Message-ID: <485ef521$0$12292$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> John Smith wrote: > http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11258.html She's been mentioned a few times, especially after McCain admitted he wasn't a hot shot when it comes to economic issues. Having her behind his back would help him with the economic side. (or so they say). Carly, despite being a blonde bimbo, can speak and say nothing using this week,s buzzwords without saying anything or without understanding any of it. Sounds like the perfect definition of a politician. I think it will come down to whether McCain feels he needs a token female as VP to counter the possibility of Hillary as VP. Hopefully the VP debate will be held in a giant vat of jello which would make for a most excellent cat fight between Hillary and Carly. "My hairdresser is better than yours", "my business jet is bigger than yours", "yeah, but mine is faster than yours". One thing is for sure, Carly understand and supports the patriot act very well. She likes the ability to listen in on phone conversations, plant emails to fetter out certain people etc etc. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:41:40 -0700 (PDT) From: yyyc186 Subject: Re: To those who may be interested - OpevVMS Cobol Opportunity Message-ID: <2230872c-5f7a-4ff7-a12e-d2bfb86344a0@27g2000hsf.googlegroups.com> > Position:OpenVMS COBOL Developer/Open VMS BASIC Developer > Location:Fulltime/Permanent > Salary:open > Since the post didn't tell you the location, I'll pipe up. Judging from the needed skills, this is Health.Net. (Yes, you've read about them on the news) They pay really really low. Last time they were looking for "consultants" with these skills, they were "offering" $40/ hr in Orange County, CA. The highest cost of living in the nation and they are looking to pay entry level wages. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:11:32 -0400 From: "William Webb" Subject: Re: VAM Hobbyist Message-ID: <8660a3a10806221411s69fbe19by2d50f2dca086754d@mail.gmail.com> On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Dan O'Reilly wrote: > No, we do read it! Please contact me at dano@process.com and we can see > what you need and what we can do. > > At 09:18 AM 6/20/2008, IanMiller wrote: >> >> On Jun 18, 11:29 am, issinoho wrote: >> > Open note to Process Software... >> > >> > Chaps, any chance that in the future you would consider making VAM >> > (VMS Authentication Module) available to the Hobbyist community as >> > you've done for most of your other products? I'd be very interested in >> > this. >> >> >> What feature of VAM are you wishing to use? >> >> You would be better emailing someone at Process as they may well not >> read here. > > ------ > +-------------------------------+----------------------------------------+ > | Dan O'Reilly | "There are 10 types of people in this | > | Principal Engineer | world: those who understand binary | > | Process Software | and those who don't." | > | http://www.process.com | | > +-------------------------------+----------------------------------------+ > > Hi, Dan0, long time. Working at a place that uses Multinet, always tell the support folks on those odd occasions when we have to open a call to tell you and Hunter I said hello. Still using those DEClaser 3200s I sent you the maintenance manual for? Best regards, WWWebb ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:24:20 +0000 From: "Main, Kerry" Subject: RE: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Message-ID: > -----Original Message----- > From: Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing > [mailto:winston@SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU] > Sent: June 21, 2008 5:19 PM > To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com > Subject: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) > > VMSers -- > > I'm trying to wrap my head around how virtualized VMS systems > participate in > certain aspects of clustering and volume shadowing. There may be > something > I'm just not getting. So this is kind of general. > > At the HP Tech Forum I got to play with booting a virtual Itanium on a > real > Itanium blade (which ran HPVM which runs on HP/UX; my first HP/UX login > ever). > I've encountered, also, the SRI Alpha emulators, and seen the SimH VAX > emulator > running. (I was trying to ask the kind of question I'm asking here at > the > Wilm's very interesting session on the architecture of the Alpha > emulator, and > I made them sound like plain VMS questions, but they're really > questions about > the interaction of the emulated VMS node with the cluster, and I didn't > formulate them very well in person. I totally get that what the SRI > Alpha > emulator provides is an Alpha inside your Windows box, and that once > it's up, > VMS is VMS - or Tru-64 is Tru-64, or Linux is Linux, or whatever.) > Alan, My albeit somewhat biased point of view from a mission critical viewpoint (less important environments may have a different view): - Dev/QA environments should be as close to Prod as possible. Hence, Using virtual IO and computing environments for Dev/QA and real environ's for Prod is not a good strategy. - IT staffing is directly proportional to the number of OS instances, so the more VM environments, the more real work required to maintain, backup, monitor, license, the greater the staffing and licensing related costs. An example of what happens to most shops today - Cust starts with say 40 servers, virtualizes to 40 instances on 10-15 servers using VMware. Great! Reduce HW, DC costs etc!! Of course, within a year, they are up to 70-80 OS instances and all of a sudden they need to hire more staff .. so much for the cost savings. - Many vendors do not support their products in VM environments. If this is important, then this must be taken into consideration. - The reason why many OS's like Windows/Linux are loving the virtualized strategies is that traditionally and culturally they do not do business App stacking on the same OS instance, so virtualization is a good (albeit short term) strategy to reduce HW related server and DC costs which have gone out of control during the last 10 years - primarily based on the one bus App, one OS, one server model put in place. OpenVMS environ's do not have the cultural and/or technical challenges associated with App stacking on the same OS or even in the same cluster. - Moving forward, I would typically recommend a Itanium blade based Dev/QA OpenVMS environment and a blade or larger Itanium server environment for Prod environments. Need another Dev environment? Drop another blade in. At least with this approach, the IO and drivers would all be the same and you would reduce the potential for running into Prod issues when a particular prob was not found in Dev as it was using different drivers or issues related to the virtual environment. In summary, imho, the future will be about how to reduce work and OS instances and not about establishing more OS instances related to OS virtualization. [and btw, SAP now states that to support OS instance consolidation, Cust's should put the App servers on the same OS instance as the DB.] If I were in charge of a mission critical VMS environment, I would be looking at App stacking strategies using class schedulers, workload monitoring, mgmt and improved SLA reporting capabilities. Looking at virt environments and strategies would be a very low priority. :-) Regards Kerry Main Senior Consultant HP Services Canada Voice: 613-254-8911 Fax: 613-591-4477 kerryDOTmainAThpDOTcom (remove the DOT's and AT) OpenVMS - the secure, multi-site OS that just works. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:15:03 +0200 From: "P. Sture" Subject: Re: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Message-ID: In article <485E7346.90801@qwest.net>, Jim Mehlhop wrote: > Yes as an example of this use the lddriver that is included in VMS 7.3-2 > and beyond for testing. It is a container file just like the virtual > disks from SIMH or personal alpha FWIW I'm successfully using LMDRIVER to do "tape backups" to container files held on an NFS volume. Since I haven't managed to persuade my Mac to host as NFS V3 (NFS V2 only supports files up to 2GB), I've set those tape container files at 700 MB so I can copy them to a CD apiece. LMDRIVER handles continuation tapes nicely using the SWITCH command. In other words you don't have to muck around calculating how many files will fit on a CD. Selective restores are wonderfully fast :-) -- Paul Sture OpenVMS Freeware CD listings: http://openvms.sture.ch/freeware/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 15:28:29 -0400 From: JF Mezei Subject: Re: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Message-ID: <485ea97f$0$7315$c3e8da3@news.astraweb.com> Main, Kerry wrote: > - Dev/QA environments should be as close to Prod as possible. Hence, > Using virtual IO and computing environments for Dev/QA and real environ's > for Prod is not a good strategy. For business applications, wouldn't having virtualised environment moe or less ensure developpers don't stray from standard practices ? > - The reason why many OS's like Windows/Linux are loving the virtualized > strategies is that traditionally and culturally they do not do business > App stacking on the same OS instance, And Microsoft likes to sell many many many Windows licenses. So they would much rather have you virtualise 40 Windows licences rather than consolidate into 1 or 2 Windows licences/instances. It doesn't have much incentive to change that. How Balmer steers Microsoft now that Gates is out, I don't know. Balmer strikes me as a Curly type of accountant. > - Moving forward, I would typically recommend a Itanium blade based > Dev/QA OpenVMS environment and a blade or larger Itanium server > environment for Prod environments. is it correct to state that at this point in time, a blade with 2 IA64 cards will have 2 instances of VMS (aka: one instance can't combine 2 cards). ? If so, then blades do not solve any problem of true consolidation. They are just a neat concept of condensing multiple servers into one box and generating more cash for HP. > Looking at virt environments and strategies would be a very low > priority. Do I detect a change in heart on this matter ? I swear, I thought you were pushing virtualised environments not so long ago. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:16:43 +0000 From: "Main, Kerry" Subject: RE: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Message-ID: > -----Original Message----- > From: JF Mezei [mailto:jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca] > Sent: June 22, 2008 3:28 PM > To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com > Subject: Re: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) > > Main, Kerry wrote: > > > - Dev/QA environments should be as close to Prod as possible. Hence, > > Using virtual IO and computing environments for Dev/QA and real > environ's > > for Prod is not a good strategy. > > For business applications, wouldn't having virtualised environment moe > or less ensure developpers don't stray from standard practices ? > > Not sure I understand what you mean. Virtualized environments are no different than a physical OS environment from a developers point of view. They look and feel the same, but of course the reality is that different physical environment sits underneath all of this virtual world. > > - The reason why many OS's like Windows/Linux are loving the > virtualized > > strategies is that traditionally and culturally they do not do > business > > App stacking on the same OS instance, > > And Microsoft likes to sell many many many Windows licenses. So they > would much rather have you virtualise 40 Windows licences rather than > consolidate into 1 or 2 Windows licences/instances. It doesn't have > much > incentive to change that. I certainly do not disagree. For Microsoft, virtualization is a great thing as they still get their OS licenses and in fact, will likely get more because most Cust's not have the self control and VM's typically spring up like rabbits much faster than the distributed world sprung up standalone x86 boxes that now sit at less than 10% utilization. > How Balmer steers Microsoft now that Gates is > out, I don't know. Balmer strikes me as a Curly type of accountant. > > > > - Moving forward, I would typically recommend a Itanium blade based > > Dev/QA OpenVMS environment and a blade or larger Itanium server > > environment for Prod environments. > > > is it correct to state that at this point in time, a blade with 2 IA64 > cards will have 2 instances of VMS (aka: one instance can't combine 2 > cards). ? Physically, a single blade is simply a standalone server that plugs into a common blade infrastructure. Think of them as something smaller than a 1U server, but with dual NICs, dual FC adapters and 1 or 2 optional adapters. Hence, with 5 blades in a 4u (not sure what U size is) blade rack, you can have either 5 standalone VMS environments, 1 cluster with 5 nodes or some combo in between. > > If so, then blades do not solve any problem of true consolidation. They > are just a neat concept of condensing multiple servers into one box and > generating more cash for HP. > Space in DC is a big reason for going to blades - especially for Wintel/ Linux types who put VMware on each blade and run 5+ instances on each blade. This is big benefit for them when you look at each instance today running on a standalone x86 server running less than 10% (in peak times). > > Looking at virt environments and strategies would be a very low > > priority. > > Do I detect a change in heart on this matter ? I swear, I thought you > were pushing virtualised environments not so long ago. No - I am heavily involved in consolidation (any platform), but typically only recommend virtualization for Wintel/Linux environments. There are good cases for HP-UX (HPVM), Solaris (containers) as well, but the X86 servers are the primary reason DC's are running out of space and power. When companies do server consolidation, typically 70-80% of the work to be done involves x86 servers. Wintel/Linux also do not have the culture & technical support capabilities to do large scale Apps stacking on the same OS. With OpenVMS environments, I usually recommend App stacking and workload (WL) management strategies in clustered environments. Reduce the OS instances to fewer, but more highly available OS instances. Use logicals, ACL's etc to separate WL's. At some point in the future, the Microsoft/Linux world will need to come to grips with App stacking strategies, but it will not be a pretty picture as the culture of a single bus App on a single OS instance is heavily ingrained as part of their culture. Regards Kerry Main Senior Consultant HP Services Canada Voice: 613-254-8911 Fax: 613-591-4477 kerryDOTmainAThpDOTcom (remove the DOT's and AT) OpenVMS - the secure, multi-site OS that just works. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:07:55 -0700 From: "Tom Linden" Subject: Re: Virtualized VMS in clusters (general questions) Message-ID: On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:16:43 -0700, Main, Kerry wrot= e: > Hence, with 5 blades in a 4u (not sure what U size is) blade rack, you= = > can > have either 5 standalone VMS environments, 1 cluster with 5 nodes or > some combo in between. 1 U =3D 1.75" -- = PL/I for OpenVMS www.kednos.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:41:21 +0000 From: "Main, Kerry" Subject: RE: VMS layered products paper documentation updates problem ? Message-ID: > -----Original Message----- > From: Simon Clubley [mailto:clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org- > Earth.UFP] > Sent: June 9, 2008 11:59 AM > To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com > Subject: Re: VMS layered products paper documentation updates problem ? > > In article , > clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP (Simon Clubley) writes: > > In article , John Reagan > writes: > >> Simon Clubley wrote: > >> > >>> I'm still interested in knowing if anyone else has received current > >>> versions of the DCPS and DEC C paper documentation kits as part of > their > >>> contract; there have been more recent versions of both of those > products. > >>> > >> > >> We don't update the documentation at each compiler release. > >> > >> What version is printed on the title page of your hardcopy manual? > >> > >> Part number on the book? > >> > > > > Thanks for replying. > > > > The last version of the Language Reference Manual and the User Guide > > that I have are for version 6.5. The part number on the contract is > > QA-MU7AA-GZ and I have confirmed that the part number is listed in > > the current HP/DEC C SPD. > > > > What was the last version of HP/DEC C to get a printed manual update > ? > > > > BTW, has anyone else in the UK found software items on their contract > that > they once received updates on, but apparently no longer do, yet HP > neglected > to inform them of that fact or remove the old items from the contract ? > > For example, the layered products media kits used to be updated on CD > on an individual basis, yet now only come on the consolidated software > update CDs only (at least according to the current SPDs). > > Also, is anyone else having problems getting general HP contract > queries > within the UK answered ? > > I _still_ haven't been able to find out from HP UK what the last > printed > versions of the DEC/HP C manuals and the DCPS manuals were. > > I don't recall it ever been this difficult in years gone past getting > answers to straightforward VMS related queries... > > Thanks for any feedback, > > Simon. > > -- > Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP > Microsoft: Bringing you 1980's technology to a 21st century world Simon, Not sure if these will be of use, but just in case: TCPIP Online doc's: (V5.6 to V5.3) http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/tcpip56.html HP C for OpenVMS (V7.3 and V6.5 - Vax) http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/c/c_index.html http://h71000.www7.hp.com/commercial/c/index_I64.html (HP C V7.3) HP DCPS: http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/dcps24.html Regards Kerry Main Senior Consultant HP Services Canada Voice: 613-254-8911 Fax: 613-591-4477 kerryDOTmainAThpDOTcom (remove the DOT's and AT) OpenVMS - the secure, multi-site OS that just works. ------------------------------ End of INFO-VAX 2008.348 ************************