As of 2020, many companies are migrating towards Cloud solutions to solve their IT infrastructure. The so called “Cloud” is a nebulous term to describe the service of Cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to a type of computer service where clients can gain remote access into powerful machines with dedicated software via the internet. Any client can host their software, access databases, or even remote into their own services from anywhere in the world for a small monthly or annual service fee. The flexibility provided by Cloud computing cannot be understated.

Currently, there are a myriad of cloud hosting services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platforms, and so on. There also exists many other smaller clouds services such as Paperspace, but among these largest ones listed previously tend to have the most software support. Many companies have transitioned or are currently interested in migrating services over to the cloud, simply thanks to the flexibility and tangible benefits listed earlier. As a result, many applications and services need to adapt to the moving platform found on the cloud and ensure compatibility with cloud hosting services.

Many legacy technologies are currently being replicated on modern hardware thanks to advancements in software emulation. In particular, Comware uses software emulators run legacy machines such as the PDP-11, HP-1000 and DEC-alpha on modern Windows machines(to see more check out our website) . Alongside windows emulators, we also run emulators of the previous machines on bare-metal. Bare-metal, in this case refers to running the software directly off the hardware without a host operating system in between.

With those two previous options for running emulated machines, the next difficulty comes in migrating methods onto the cloud. Currently, we can emulating running our hypervisor on bare-metal by using a built in solution such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, a virtual machine environment included with Windows as of 2008. With Hyper-V, we can recreate a bare-metal server and load the necessary server onto a virtual hard drive (VHD), and from there run the necessary environment. Naturally, because the environment is virtual, not all compatibility issues will be resolved immediately. Some problems that come about include internet connection, and configuring the MAC address for the virtual device. Another problem includes controlling licensing issues, which come with a few solutions that won’t be spoiled here.

In the next article, we’ll talk more about cloud architecture and VSI Cloud, a specific cloud solution for VAX and ALPHA environments.

[1] https://sevaa.com/blog/2018/07/cloud-computing/

[2] https://phoenixnap.com/blog/what-is-bare-metal-server