Development: VAX & Alpha Cross-Platform Virtualization Solutions

Migration Specialties has developed a Hardware Virtualization Layer (HVL) designed to facilitate the development and deployment of legacy hardware emulators. Similar to solutions like VMware®, but targeted at older systems, the HVL can support multiple instances of Legacy Virtual Machines (LVM). Our first LVM releases under the HVL framework are a pair of AlphaServer 400 emulators, FreeAXP™ and Avanti™. More Alpha and VAX emulators will follow.

The HVL contains sophisticated technology that simplifies legacy system virtualization, often allowing legacy hardware to be replaced in a matter of days. The HVL allows data centers to consolidate older systems into virtual space on modern hardware without changing the legacy O/S or software applications. It provides immediate benefits in improved reliability, better support options, reduction in support costs, reduction in power consumption, and recovery of floor space. All of these benefits are available without the need to retrain end users or significantly change existing operating procedures.

Migration Specialties developed the HVL for deployment on Windows, Linux, and OpenVMS platforms. Emulators built on top of the HVL allow OpenVMS and Tru64 applications hosted on legacy VAX and Alpha hardware to be moved to modern hardware without change.

The FreeAXP™ and Avanti™ Alpha emulators are currently under development, with production release planned for Q1, 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, Microsoft, Nemonix Engineering, XDelta Limited, Strobe Data, BRUDEN-OSSG, Control-X Limited, and Caponier Limited.

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

March 9, 2010: Avanti Beta in the Field

An Avanti beta is in the field. Avanti was used to replace an existing CHARON-AXP installation. The emulator swap took under four hours on a Sunday. No container file changes or system configuration changes were required to achieve the transition. Monday morning users were none the wiser, their Alpha OpenVMS applications continuing to run just as expected.

March 6, 2010: Tru64 & OpenVMS Builds & Boots

To date, the following Tru64 and OpenVMS versions have been built and booted on FreeAXP.

Older versions of OpenVMS going back to version 6.1H3 will eventually be supported. Versions prior to 7.2 require adding support for an additional feature on the emulated SCSI controller

March 5, 2010: Caponier Joins the Team

Migration Specialties is pleased to add Caponier Ltd. to the list of organizations supporting FreeAXP and Avanti development. John Manger at Caponier, a highly respected Tru64 expert, formerly of HP's European Engineering Services, HP UK's senior Tru64 UNIX Engineer, Tru64 UNIX Security Focus Engineer for Europe (within HP SSRT), and HP UK Education's Senior Tru64 UNIX Trainer, will be utilizing his expertise and experience to ensure top notch Tru64 support on FreeAXP, Avanti, and future products.

February 23, 2010: Availability Manager covers FreeAXP

Availability Manager has no problem tracking a FreeAXP system. FreeAXP shows up as an AlphaServer 400 in the Availability Manager display.

February 12, 2010: MAC Parallels Boot

FreeAXP booted and run on Mac OSX 10.6 in Parallels 5.0 on Windows 7.

February 9, 2010: MAC Boot Camp.

FreeAXP booted and run on a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo running Windows 7 under Apple Boot Camp.

February 2, 2010: FreeAXP™ Beta 219

FreeAXP™ Beta 219 released to select testers.

January 26, 2010: FreeAXP™ Clustered

FreeAXP™ successfully clustered with real Alpha and Intgrity hardware running OpenVMS 7.3-2 and 8.3.

January 22, 2010: FreeAXP™ Beta 211

FreeAXP™ Beta 211 released to select testers. FreeAXP now supports both 32 and 64-bit Windows O/S.

January 11, 2010: FreeAXP™ Beta 196

FreeAXP™ Beta 196 released to select testers.

January 11, 2010: FreeAXP™ User Guide

The FreeAXP™ User Guide is now available for review.

January 7, 2010: OpenVMS 8.4FT

OpenVMS 8.4 Field Test has been successfully installed and run on FreeAXP and Avanti.

January 1, 2010: Happy New Year!

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.