Darya Zelenina

At VMS Software, it is our mission to protect the value that our customers have built into their applications on OpenVMS over decades. These applications are bespoke masterpieces written to cater just to a specific company and use case, they are ingrained in their culture and operations, and still functioning from thirty years ago, still running - let's face it - a large portion of the modern world. With OpenVMS now running on x86 and in the cloud, it is entirely possible for most of our customers to keep their valuable applications on this legendary platform.

Like many other companies, IT or otherwise, we go through an annual exercise of reviewing our risk assessments. You know the drill: list your resources including people, offices, software, hardware, customers, data centers, contractors, and so on, and then list all the things that can happen to them and color-code risks based on how likely and how bad they are, and then think of how they can be mitigated. And while staring at line 366 of my risk assessment, I thought to myself: I wonder how many people put OpenVMS in their risk assessments?

As standard support for OpenVMS V8.4-2L1 for Integrity ends in December 2024, we strongly recommend that customers upgrade to V8.4-2L3. While extended engineering support for V8.4-2L1 remains available, the transition to V8.4-2L3 is advised to ensure increased compliance with the latest standards and continued optimal performance. However, some customers have encountered issues with the RTL8 kit on V8.4-2L3, which have hindered their ability to upgrade. This article aims to outline these issues and provide our recommended solutions.