Installation of VMS

For Alpha I recommend to set your console to serial and connect the PC's serial port with the serial port of the VMS system - and start a real VT100 compatible terminal emulator to access the console. For Itanium, you can connect the management console to your TCPIP network and set it up. Connect your PC to the the management unit, either by the network or using the serial port, if present.

This is not a requirement if you do have a graphic card installed and have video and keyboard (and mouse) directly connected to the system, but using a terminal emulator will come very, very handy after installation... Another advantage is you can directly save (cut & paste) your installation session, in case you encounter problems.

The rest slightly depends on the type of system: VAX, Alpha or Itanium, or better: the type of media, but the principle is very much the same:

Older VAX systems, booting from tape, will start a minimal VMS system, only capable of BACKUP/IMAGE the tape contents to a specified disk. Alpha and Itanium, booting from CD or DVD, will start a basic version of VMS, and show a menu that allows you to install VMS on any disk, or execute DCL commands.

After reboot - you do have a VMS system. You can do all basic tasks, but only as SYSTEM from the console. No network. No compilations. Just DCL. To do anything more, you'll need to install licenses.

Licenses

Getting a license is fairly straight forward.

If you ordered OpenVMS at HP, you'll pay for the licenses you need. The total cost may seem high, but do not forget that quality comes with a price. There is, as fas as I know, no annual fee for running a particular version of OpenVMS, so you can run that version of OpenVMS until eternity. The downside of this is that you'll have to pay for every support you need, unless you're willing to pay a fee for a support contract. Moving to a higher version of the OS may be part of the license - or you'll have to pay a relatively small fee for the upgrade.

This is the only legal way to run VMS in a commercial production environment.

If you plan to run OpenVMS in an educational enviroment, and plan to use it in education and porting software, contact your HP representative - HP offers special discounts for educational institutions.

If you plan to run OpenVMS as de developer or HP partner, contact HP as well for discounts. Becoming a DSPP member can be worthwhile - including license cost discounts.

If you plan to run OpenVMS in a non-commerical, personal environment, cost is mainly the subscription fee for a HP user group, and, if you can't get hold of them, media containing OpenVMS and layered products, like network, compilers and such. Once you have your membership, you can obtain your licenses via the OpenVMS hobbyist site, where you can order the media as well. These hobbyist licenses are valid for one year so you'll have to repeat the request and installation on a yearly basis.

The Links pages mentions a number of HP user organizations.

Installing licenses

If you happen to work with the hobbyist license, it will come as a command procedure. But since you have no network, there is no simple way to pass in onto your system. That's where the PC comes handy.

  1. Login as SYSTEM into the VMS system.
  2. Start an edit session on a new file, call it "LICENSES.COM" or whatever name you think is appropriate.
  3. Open the license procedure with the most basic text editor you have. Full screen is required... (for a PC, use Notepad).
  4. Select all text form the file that is obviously VMS (starts with "$") and copy into the pastebuffer (Cut, CTRL-C)
  5. Now activate the terminal emulator session and paste the buffer (CTRL-V)
  6. Exit the editor
  7. Execute the procedure: @LICENSES

This will install and load your licenses. NO REBOOT IS REQUIRED.

If you don't have a command procedure, you can create a command procedure yourself containing each license you need to enter: 

$ license disable/log <product>
$ Write Sys$output "Registering and Loading <product>"
$ Write Sys$output ""
$ license register <product>-
/ISSUER=<issuer>-
/AUTHORIZATION=<authorization>-
/PRODUCER=<producer>-
/UNITS=0-
/TERMINATION_DATE=<termination date>-
/ACTIVITY=CONSTANT=<activity>-
/TOKEN=<token>-
/CHECKSUM=<checksum>
$!
$license unload/log <product>/producer = <producer>
$license enable <product>/auth=<authorization>/producer=<producer> 
$license load <product> /producer=<producer>

For VMS, <producer> and <issuer> are usually "DEC". Be sure that ALL data is correct - a single mistake in any will invalidate <checksum> and the license will not be loaded.

Patches

Users and OpenVMS engineering will sometimes find wrong omissions and plain errors, and once in a while, HP releases "patches" that contain corrected images. They come in levels:

  1. To be installed by all users - these correct critical problems that everyone can run into.
  2. To be installed when you use a particular product - these correct problems in that product only.
  3. To be installed when you run into one of the problems addressed - these correct non-critical porblems. You can also install them pro-actively (to prevent the problem to occur)

Some patches require the system to be rebooted - most system patches need a reboot. Because the images are installed (kept in memory) installation will give a new version of the image but most can not easily be replaced, it may involve internal structures be invalidated, and some fundamental processing will not be able to be finished properly, or be started at all. So reboot really is the only option in these cases. In a cluster you can boot system by system - allowing your applications to be available all the time.

Patches c an be downloaded from the HP ITRC site, at the bottom wou'll find a linkt where to download the patches. However, you'll need to subscribe - which, as well, is free - to access the patches.

VMSInstallation (last edited 2008-03-31 07:32:06 by admin)