It had lovely first-class support for batch queues, local and distributed, with load balancing, quotas, forwarding, etc, which you still cannot get on a Linux s

It had lovely first-class support for batch queues, local and distributed, with load balancing, quotas, forwarding, etc, which you still cannot get on a Linux system. It had great shared/cluster filesystems, that came standard, that have only been replicated in about the last 5 years in Linux (see Gluster/Ceph/etc), and the Linux equivalents are (still!) less well documented with much higher admin overhead. The downside was, of course, that all those great features worked only with VMS software and hardware, and only with specific combinations of the above.