vtVAX Host System Requirements (Single Instance)
The following requirements and recommendations apply to the host system on which vtVAX will run. Increasing the host CPU performance will improve the performance of the virtualized system.
Processor
- Intel or AMD 32-bit or 64-bit (64-bit required for Bare Metal); Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron recommended.
- One core is required for each emulated CPU; one additional core is required for the emulator. In some circumstances providing additional cores for the emulator may improve performance.
- Clock speed: 2.4 GHz or higher; 3.0 GHz min. for VAX 7000 emulation. Slower CPUs may provide acceptable performance when the application CPU requirements are very light.
- FSB (Intel only): 1333 MHz or higher (recommended)
- Hyper-threading is not supported. CPUs with hyper-threading may be used if the hyper-threading is disabled.
Virtual VAX systems with heavy I/O workloads may benefit from dedicating additional CPU cores to I/O processing.
Operating System
There are two versions of the vtVAX emulator, vtVAX for Windows and vtVAX Bare Metal.
vtVAX for Windows will install under Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 10, Windows 11 or Windows Server 2019/2016/2012/2008. For proper operation, vtVAX must be run by a user with Administrator rights.
vtVAX Bare Metal requires no underlying OS. This version can be installed on a physical server or desktop PC, on a hypervisor such as VMware or Hyper-V, or in the Cloud (e.g., AWS, Azure).
Memory
A minimum of 2 GB of memory plus the amount of memory configured for the virtualized VAX system.
Network
Network connectivity to the host while vtVAX is running requires a dedicated network interface. On the Windows platform, each virtual network adapter configured requires a dedicated physical network interface. On the Bare Metal platform, a virtual switch may be configured to allow multiple virtual network adapters to share a single physical interface. Consideration should be given to potential I/O bottlenecks when sharing physical interfaces.
Storage
Disk and tape units in the virtual environment may be mapped to physical SCSI drives or to logical devices, each of which requires a single container file which is created within the host file system on local, network, or cloud devices. Consideration should be given to performance, reliability, and availability for critical virtual devices.
NOTE: HP disk controllers with software RAID capability are not supported for use with the RAID feature enabled. Controllers with hardware RAID capability are fully supported. For details, see the vtServer Host Platform Compatibility List, available from the Documentation page of our web site.
Multiple Instance Requirements
Any mix of virtual VAX (and, on Bare Metal, Alpha) systems may run simultaneously on a given host provided there are sufficient resources are present. The resource requirements are the total of the requirements for each instance that will be running simultaneously.