OpenVMS 9.2-1 on real hardware success.

[pocketprobe]

After a successful installation of OpenVMS into ESXi 7.0.3, and knowing of the DL380 being something that was targeted for running on bare metal I decided to try it on a machine I owned that was fairly similar albeit imperfect.

The system board is an ASRock X99 WS, CPU is a E5-2609 v3 and there is 32GB of memory in the machine. I am using 1068E based LSI SAS controller as something had OpenVMS allergic to the AHCI controllers on the board on this machine. Two disks are attached and enumeration in the bootloader seems to be reliable. The first NIC, a I217 is picked up by the driver stack from a clean install via netboot. One thing I found strange about this board is having two serial ports, and both work in OpenVMS, one as OPA0:. and one as TTA0:.

With a trusty VT520 for a OPA0, and manually keying in the OPENVMS-X86-BOE PAK to enable TCPIP and SSH, things seem to work well. There's a lot yet to play with on the system and I'm still learning VMS... I'm hoping to make it run a few game servers once the OpenJDK port is complete.

Thanks for reading the story, and I'm happy to entertain any questions.

[imiller]

could be related to DECnet wanting to change the MAC address. If you are running DECnet/Plus then you can tell it not to by setting ENABLE PHASEIV ADDRESS to False on that circuit.