VSI OpenVMS V9.2-3 for x86-64 is now available as part of our ongoing development of the port to the industry-standard CPU architecture.
VMS Software, Inc. has migrated OpenVMS and its layered products to the industry standard x86-64 architecture to help customers protect their investment in OpenVMS infrastructure, especially in virtualized environments and in the cloud. Its main focus is on enhancements for virtualization, while also addressing issues found since V9.2-2.
For hypervisors on which OpenVMS has been tested by VSI, please scroll down to the bottom of the page. To determine if the CPU in your system provides the features required to run OpenVMS V9.2-1 or later, run this Python script. Information on the virtual machine hosts tested by VSI is provided below and in the release notes. You can compile your code natively on OpenVMS x86. Starting with V9.2-3, cross-compilers are no longer provided.
Check lists of open-source and layered products that work with OpenVMS here (filter by architecture to see those available on x86).
New Features
- VMware VMDirectPath for Fibre Channel Passthrough Support: Allows direct access to Fibre Channel SAN storage from a VMware ESXi virtual machine.
- Guest Console: provides a VGA/keyboard based console for situations where the use of an emulated serial port is impossible or undesirable.
- VMware vMotion Support: Allows the live migration of an OpenVMS virtual machine from one host to another on a properly configured VMware ESXi cluster. An instruction video can be found here and a whitepaper can be found here.
- Automatic configuration and startup of TCP/IP and OpenSSH: Provides an option during installation to automatically configure TCP/IP and OpenSSH using an existing DHCP server
- Virtio-net and VMXNET3 Network Drivers: Drivers for para-virtualized network interfaces on both VMware and KVM offer better performance.
- Availability Manager Data Collector: Allows Availability Manager to be used with x86 systems. This requires version 4.0 of the Availability Manager Data Analyzer, which is not yet available at the time of release.
- ACME Agent: Enables the use of external authentication. Using external authentication with SSH will require an update to OpenSSH which is not yet available at the time of release.
Documentation
CPU Requirements
- Intel or AMD x86 CPU
- 64-bit Instruction set
- NX processor bit (NX)
- Streaming SIMD Extensions 4.1 (SSE4.1)
- Virtualization Technology (VT-x/AMD-V)
- XSAVE instructions
- Time Stamp Counter (TSC)
- Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (APIC)
- Memory Type Range Registers (MTRR)
Most Intel CPUs from 2016/AMD (Zen) CPUs from 2017 and later support these processor features.
Optional Features:
- Process-Context Identifier feature (PCID)
- Extended Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller (x2APIC)
- XSAVEOPT instruction
- FSGSBASE instructions
- Microarchitectural Data Sampling Mitigation (MD_CLEAR)
Tested Platforms
For more about compatibility issues, refer to the Release Notes.
Virtual Machines Tested:
- Rocky Linux 9.4; QEMU emulator version 8.2.0 (qemu-kvm-8.2.0-11.e19_4.6)
- Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS; QEMU emulator version 6.2.0 (Debian 1:6.2+dfsg-2ubuntu6.24)
- RHEL 9.4; QEMU emulator version 8.2.0 (qemu-kvm-8.2.0-11.e19_4.6)
- ESXi V8.0.x (with compatibility of 8, 7.0U2)
- Workstation Pro V17
- Fusion Pro V13.5.2
- VSI tests with VirtualBox V7.0.x and regularly installs patches when they are available.
For a list of Windows settings required to run OpenVMS as a VM guest on VirtualBox installed on a Windows host system, visit our wiki.
Note: VSI does not impose any limitations on any virtual machines running OpenVMS with respect to the number of SCSI or SAS storage controllers. Please refer to the appropriate hypervisor configuration guidelines for information on SCSI and SAS storage controller configuration limitations.
For the previous release info, refer to this page.
Questions?
Check out our x86 Port Q&A or contact us.