Winnili.net

Hardware Fanatism Rehab



Welcome! This is the former web site of the Winnili OpenVMS Cluster initiative. New plans and ideas, for this domain, are on their way and ‘under construction’. For now, I hope you'll enjoy these few memories accompanied by pictures.

The plan was, originally, to provide remote access — at one point I even considered public remote access — to my VMScluster consisting of largely maximized HP OpenVMS[1] “I64”[2] nodes — i.e. ‘cluster building blocks’, if you will — consisting mostly of HP Integrity-class rx2600 and rx2620 2U[3] server-type systems.

The aforementioned nodes each had the following... All whilst running VMS I64 V8.4 via the “OpenVMS Hobbyist Program” with the non-commercial licensing as provided by it. I also had various tape devices hooked up, mostly DAT (DDS-4, -5 and -6) and Ultrium (LTO-3 primarily), for obvious back-up purposes; the indigeneous VMS BACKUP tool is certainly a very adequate one.

Those plans were sadly cancelled, eventually, because it proved to be too costly and large-scale and time-consuming for me to administer. Especially certain security implications didn't make it particularly attractive for me either (i.e. having to monitor the system at all times and be responsible for who would gain access to it). I also wasn't sure about the viability of the project, whether I'd attract people sincerely interested in VMS or mostly troublemakers looking for a “shell host”... Since then, practically all my systems and many parts were sold. What largely remains (amongst also other things), I will offer here. If you should need anything and believe I may have it, please don't hesitate to contact me either.

Below is what I ran up to late 2012, except for the FC disk enclosure (that is connected to an SGI Tezro graphics workstation). Since then I've moved from this vast setup...






... to just this, beginning the first quarter of this year (2013).




It's a quad-core Intel Core i7 PCI-Express bus “mini-PC” form factor system, with 16 Gbytes of dual-channel DDR3 RAM, SSD and mechanical SATA internal storage, external Ultra320 SCSI storage (~14 Tbytes in RAID-5) and a dual-channel/port fiber-optical 10-Gbit converged network/storage adapter with FCoE[5] capability (although at the moment I'm using the CNA[6] card as a 10-Gbit Ethernet NIC; which, if I may add, works excellently).

It sure also is nice that I can hear myself think again, hear birds sing outside and concentrate on my work to the fullest, without all that noise (even separated by a wall, in another room). It also certainly doesn't feel like my house is being heated constantly (... also during summers). I now virtualize and emulate everything I need in this tiny, yet powerful and silent, beast. I've been emulating VMS (and Tru64 UNIX as well) since then, with success. (So, yes, I still run these operating systems.) It's not even consuming nearly a quarter(!) of one of the former systems — as seen in the above pictures — that I used to own and run.

What I forgot to add, in case you may ask if I ever bothered with anything else: As a matter of fact, I did. I diversified’ my hardware setup with Alpha[7] systems at various points in time. For instance, after selling my last two rx2600s, I got my hands on two 466 MHz DECchip 21264/EV6 AlphaServer DS10 systems.

About a year/year-and-a-half ago, I got my hands on a — and for that matter one of the nicest and most desirable AXP systems ever made — mint-condition 1 GHz DECchip 21264C/EV68CB AlphaServer DS15.

It performed great, it also had an ‘official’(!) — and as such very, very, pricey and rare — HP-branded ATI Radeon 7500 PCI graphics adapter — and just so you know, that is more or less the ‘best’ can get in terms of graphics offerings for VMS and Tru64 UNIX, providing also support for hardware acceleration through so-called Open3D (i.e. OpenGL, essentially) — factory-installed, along with one of those front access hot-swap disk cages (for SCA2 80-pin SCSI LVD/SE disks) and came with a good amount of memory, which I maximized to 4 Gbytes. Boot times were amazing, also responsiveness. I mostly ran VMS, also a bit of Tru64 UNIX, where the latter required a rather interesting installation procedure ... with tons of disc-swapping! (Unless you, of course, go for an disk image dump on a disk, if you can afford that convenience.)

[d|i|g|i|t|a|l] I should note that I originally started out with a 266 MHz DECchip 21064/EV4 AlphaServer 1000, with only 256 Mbytes of memory and a couple of small DEC[9] and Compaq RZ-series disks in so-called SBB[8] cradles.


Ultimately I sold most of these systems off as well, including all the above mentioned. AXP-wise, currently, only two DEC Multia/UDB systems — one 166 MHz DECchip 21066/LCA4 VX40B and another 233 MHz DECchip 21068/LCA4 VX42B — remain with only one (the 21066-variant) of the two fully ‘functional’. But, these are (or this one is) mostly for ‘toying around’. I may actually decide to sell these as well. For now, I run mostly Tru64 UNIX on one, as much as I get the chance to...

And, no, I never owned any VAX[10] hardware (only ever emulated it). The bulk of those systems were way before my time, too. At the moment I'm emulating both VAX and AXP. You may wonder about I64, why I ‘won't’ emulate that. It does not quite seem possible yet(?). Just to give you an indication, see the current state of NetBSD/ia64. They're usually ahead of porting to ‘unusual platforms’, so that should give you an indication of the progress made there. Although, I can also imagine little interest for it, as the platform isn't the most charismatic one either...







1: Hewlett-Packard (Open) Virtual Memory System
2: Intel Itanium, also known as IA-64 and IPF, also curiously named “Industry Standard 64” in the VMS context (as seen in the standard SYS$ANNOUNCE message, like at login)
3: 19-inch industry standard rack-mounting units
4: Digital Files-11 On-Disk Structure level 5
5: Fiber Channel over Ethernet
6: Converged Network Adapter
7: Alpha-processor, also known as AXP — presumably meaning ‘Almost eXactly Prism’, referring to the discontinued 32-bit Prism RISC processor ISA — which is an exclusively 64-bit RISC processor ISA developed by Digital and typically found in (e.g.) AlphaServer and AlphaStation systems
8: Storage Building Block for Digital StorageWorks storage-shelf
9: Digital Equipment Corporation, eventually just Digital (i.e. “[d|i|g|i|t|a|l]”) and which was officially used until acquirement by Compaq in 1997 and subsequently by HP in 2001
10: Virtual Address eXtension, 32-bit CISC processor ISA by Digital from around 1976~'77
Please note that this site mostly functions as a ‘placeholder’ for the time being. Something will soon come to replace it.

[ local time: Sat May 25 09:55:52 CEST 2013 | contact ]