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VMS has a reputation for clustering. At one point, [I heard that] Oracle bought clustering technology out of VMS that was used in making RAC (Real Application C

by chasil 3y ago

VMS has a reputation for clustering. At one point, [I heard that] Oracle bought clustering technology out of VMS that was used in making RAC (Real Application Cluster), and ditching Parallel Server. VMS for x86-64 has just emerged for production deployment in the past year. I don't know if it has the OS-level emulation of previous architectures (macro32 and vest, if I am correct in the VAX components, and their Alpha and Itanium equivalents), but the most modern VMS installations are on Itanium. Intel was a big user of VMS in the past, although I don't know if that remains true.

sterlind 3y ago
VMS was indeed ahead of its time on clustering. iirc, Leslie Lamport actually discovered Paxos while he was at DEC. DEC was building a fault-tolerant, distributed filesystem, but their protocols were unsound, and Leslie set to work trying to prove that their design goals were impossible. instead, he found a mathematically sound way to do it (Paxos!) see https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html
dekhn 3y ago
I read the man pages for Real Application Cluster and they appeared to be lightly reformatted version of the man pages for TruCluster (I can't speak about VMS clustering, I only know Tru64's clustering). TruCluster was definitely interesting, but expensive and fairly esoteric. Most Linux people would just horizontally scale their applications without depending on its features (a filesystem that was shared seamlessly across 8 machines, along with virtual IP address aliasing with fast failover). More details on the underlying technology: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.p...
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Tru64 was one of the few interesting UNIXes, given its alternative approach to security and kernel design, pity it ended up going away.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    It looks like Tru64 was descended from OSF/1 which run on top of a Mach microkernel, but what was the alternative approach to security?

by chasil 3y ago

sterlind 3y ago

VMS was indeed ahead of its time on clustering. iirc, Leslie Lamport actually discovered Paxos while he was at DEC. DEC was building a fault-tolerant, distributed filesystem, but their protocols were unsound, and Leslie set to work trying to prove that their design goals were impossible. instead, he found a mathematically sound way to do it (Paxos!) see https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html

dekhn 3y ago

I read the man pages for Real Application Cluster and they appeared to be lightly reformatted version of the man pages for TruCluster (I can't speak about VMS clustering, I only know Tru64's clustering). TruCluster was definitely interesting, but expensive and fairly esoteric. Most Linux people would just horizontally scale their applications without depending on its features (a filesystem that was shared seamlessly across 8 machines, along with virtual IP address aliasing with fast failover). More details on the underlying technology: https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.pdf https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol8num1/vol8num1art1.p...

pjmlp 3y ago
Tru64 was one of the few interesting UNIXes, given its alternative approach to security and kernel design, pity it ended up going away.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  It looks like Tru64 was descended from OSF/1 which run on top of a Mach microkernel, but what was the alternative approach to security?