vms ?

Is it possible to set up a VMS VM? [I am currently emulating vms on a pc with simh. The emulation when run on a virtual pc cannot connect to the internet.]

 

Parallels can't run VMS or OpenVMS, as VMS/OpenVMS distributions are written for either VAX, Alpha or Intel Itanium architectures.

Parallels emulates x86 (32 and 64 bit) architectures, and can therefore support any operating system that has been written to run on that architecture.

There are a few rumours that keep bouncing around that HP may port OpenVMS to x86-64 as it looks like the good ship Itanic is sinking fast (not that it ever got very far from port in the first place!), but no doubt cost will play a major part in that decision.

If ever they do port it over, then we will be able to run it in Parallels, and I do hope that Parallels will support it as a platform, as I can certainly see a market for it for running legacy systems.

If you're running SIMH you're no doubt using the VAX emulator.

There are some other emulators out there for VAX and Alpha (a real good free one is Personal Alpha) - but these need to run on top of the Windows Operating System - as far as I'm aware there's no native Mac/Linux versions.

There is the FreeVMS project that has been going for a few years: http://www.freevms.net/ where they have made a VMS-like operating system that runs on top of a heavily modified Linux kernel (you even have DCL as the native "shell"). This should be able to run as a Parallels Virtual Machine. However it doesn't look like there has been much activity on that project for a while, and is still in development - you certainly wouldn't get the bullet-proof O/S that VMS is, so I'm not sure if you'd want to run (or even could run) anything of use in it at the moment.

However, I've run OpenVMS Alpha in a Personal Alpha VM, running in a Windows XP Paralllels VM on a Mac without any problems at all - so perhaps you could just setup a basic Windows installation in a Parallels VM, and then run your VAX emulator in that - it would be easy to script it all up to start/close the VAX emulator on Windows startup/shutdown, and also very easy to ring-fence the network so that the VMS system cant see the outside world.