OpenVMS for x86 V9.0 EAK Goes to First Customer on May 15, 2020
VMS Software will make the first V9.0 Early Adopter Kit available for the initial customer test site May 15, 2020. It will be a preconfigured Virtual Box guest. By the end of May an updated kit will be available for a few more customers. Support for KVM and VMware guests will soon follow. Thereafter regular updates are planned as more components of the system become available and more customers sites are added.
The initial kits are for selected partners and customers who are able to start testing their applications in a very minimal environment. A year ago we contacted all current VMS Software customers and described what we thought the early V9.0 EAK would likely contain. Those interested in participating in the early releases of V9.0 were asked to respond to a questionnaire which would tell us their immediate operating needs to get started with their own application testing. The content of the initial releases is the intersection of what our EAK customers need to start being productive and what we can have ready.
The cross compilers, to be run on IA64 systems, are BLISS, C, Fortran, XMACRO, and Pascal. Some customers have already been using the Cross Tools Kit for a few months. COBOL and BASIC will follow in future updates; they are in testing now. None of the layered products or open source kits usually in an OpenVMS distribution will be available in the initial release but will be added in future updates after they are tested and deemed ready.
Most components closely associated with the base operating system are included in the initial releases, for example DCL, pipes, RMS, file system, batch system, SDA, MOUNT/DISMOUNT, AUTHORIZE, SYSGEN, SYSMAN, BACKUP, AUDIT_SERVER, ACCOUNTING, DELTA, OPCOM, MONITOR, and many more.
Components not in the initial release are volume shadowing, DEBUG (the symbolic debugger), DECnet, SMP, and clustering.
VMS Software has always placed heavy emphasis on adding support to OpenVMS to run in selected virtual machine environments and that has been our focus thus far. In addition, we will be working on direct hardware platform support as we progress toward V9.1.
