VAX & Alpha Cross-Platform Virtualization Solutions Under Development

Migration Specialties is developing VAX and Alpha virtualization solutions for OpenVMS, Linux, and Windows platforms. These solutions allow VMS, OpenVMS, and TRU64 applications hosted on legacy VAX and Alpha hardware to be re-hosted onto modern hardware such as HP's Integrity and Proliant platforms.

Our solution entails a virtualization layer that supports various hardware emulators. We are developing an Alpha emulator first, targeting production release in early 2010. This will be followed by release of a VAX emulator. We have the support of an international group of partners in this endeavor, including HP, Intel, Nemonix Engineering, XDelta Limited, Strobe Data, BRUDEN-OSSG, and Control-X Limited.

We will post progress updates on this page. Information regarding availability and pricing will become available when we announce product release dates. Postings are in reverse chronological order, with most recent develops listed first.

December 29, 2009: FreeAXP™ Beta Release

The beta of FreeAXP™, a free AlphaServer 400 emulator, is slated for release to select testers January 2, 2010. Details are available in the FreeAXP™ Beta Press Release.

December 15, 2009: Alpha Version Testing

Alpha version testing is progressing nicely on the Alpha emulator. Performance is meeting expectations and no major problems have been uncovered thus far. We anticipate making a beta release announcement soon.

October 12, 2009: TRU64 UNIX Boots

Our focus over the past month has been booting the TRU64 UNIX O/S on the Alpha emulator. We are please to report the following results to date:

• TRU64 installation CD successfully loads and boots.
• TRU64 successfully installs to a virtual disk.
• TRU64 successfully boots and configures on a virtual disk.

September 9, 2009: Physical CD Support

Physical CD support is now working with the Alpha emulator. OpenVMS CD's can be booted, mounted, and read just like on a real Alpha system. The emulator has been supporting CD ISO files for several months.

August 24, 2009: Physical SCSI Support

Physical SCSI support is now working with the Alpha emulator. Disks removed from a genuine legacy Alpha system can be booted on and accessed by the emulator.

August 17, 2009: Emulator Boot Testing

Progress continues with the Alpha Emulator. Since our first boot report in mid-June, the following milestones have been met:

• Boot the installation CD-ROM
• Install VMS onto an emulated disk
• Boot off the emulated disk
• Boot off a restore image of an OpenVMS system disk
• AUTOGEN runs successfully

Development remains on schedule. We anticipate announcing product availability and pricing in Q4, 2009.

June 14, 2009: OpenVMS Booting

Migration Specialties is please to report successful boots of OpenVMS 7.3 and 8.3 on our Alpha AS400 emulator. Successful boots have been conducted using OpenVMS on Integrity and Windows on X86 as host operating systems. We remain on schedule for a Q1 product release. We have representatives attending the OpenVMS Technology Forum this week that can discuss our virtual VAX and Alpha solutions and development plans.

May 11, 2009: AS400 & VAX Testing

Alpha emulator development continues on schedule at Migration Specialties. We are currently test booting OpenVMS on an emulated AS400. Concurrently, we are developing a regression test suite for SimH VAX to further improve the quality and consistency of this open source product. We plan to have representatives at the OpenVMS Technology Forum and hope to see you there.

March 20, 2009: Virtual VAX & Alpha Emulator Base Port to Integrity

Last week, ably assisted by the OpenVMS guru's at HP's porting center in Marlboro, MA, Migration Specialties successfully ported the Virtualization Layer and base Alpha CPU components to OpenVMS running on Integrity. Some interesting issues regarding C++ compiler behavior and p-threads were encountered and overcome during four days of porting and testing. Development is now proceeding in parallel on OpenVMS and Windows.

March 3, 2009: VL Milestone

We have completed development of the emulator environment Virtualization Layer, or VL. The VL supports everything not directly related to the bits, bytes and registers of the emulated hardware. The VL achieves this in a number of ways:

• Hiding the differing characteristics of host operating systems and hardware platforms from the rest of the emulator. This allows the same code to run on OpenVMS and Windows without having to bother about different ways to do threading or hardware access.
• Integrating emulator components that deal with user or host machine interaction. For example, VL communications ports provide the ability to communicate through a telnet session or a physical serial port. This way, this functionality can be shared by any emulated communications port without requiring additional effort, simplifying the emulation environment and providing a more consistent user experience.
• Providing a flexible emulated network infrastructure to emulated network cards.
• Integrating a sophisticated control program that allows a single instance of the emulator to support multiple virtual machines. These machines can be of the same or differing types.
• Providing an extremely flexible method to define hardware configurations in a hierarchical manner, allowing every hardware component to be fully configurable.

Development is now focused on a core Alpha processor that will allow us to generate different emulated Alpha processors (e.g. EV4, EV5) to support different Alpha platforms.