Orphan HP Alphaservers looking for a new home

[Zane Healy]

> On Dec 18, 2018, at 9:11 AM, Grant Taylor via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 12/18/2018 09:08 AM, Tapley, Mark via cctalk wrote:
>> Not to start a flame war, but I’m well aware VMS supports clustering pretty well, so I’m puzzled - does anyone know why the Product Description called out Tru64 rather than VMS or both? Was Compaq de-emphasizing VMS when that was written?
> 
> Is there a chance that what you found was a kit (order able SKU) that included Tru64?  As in was there possibly a different kit (SKU) that was (Open)VMS?
> 
> I remember seeing similar from Compaq for Windows NT vs NetWare.  Same hardware, just different software (and possibly factory BIOS config / optimizations).

Tru64 supports various bits of hardware not supported by VMS.  The one that is in the forefront of my mind is video cards, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t also disk controllers.  On Alpha’s, the SRM console supports both OpenVMS and Tru64, while the ARC firmware only supports WinNT.

As for the product description calling out the clustering in Tru64, perhaps they simply assumed anyone looking knew it would be supported in VMS.

Zane