The Scope Record

Explainers: how HP-UX and OpenVMS on Itanium work

Dated notes on the mechanics behind a keep, host or migrate question: what Itanium is now, what Integrity hosting involves, and how emulating, re-hosting and porting differ.

Start with the hardware and the clock

Most questions about an HP-UX or OpenVMS system on Itanium come back to two things: how long the hardware and operating system stay supported, and what the software needs to keep running. Each note below stands on its own, and none of them makes the choice for you.

As The Register explains, standard support for HP-UX 11i v3 on HPE Integrity servers ended on 31 December 2025, and the final release, 2505.11iv3, is the most current level the reporter could find.

We checked the facts on this page on . The choice between staying, hosting and migrating is made on our-offering.html.

Itanium is a finished processor, and that sets the arithmetic

Intel's schedule, as The Register reported it in 2019, set the final Itanium 9700 order for 30 January 2020 and the final shipment for 29 July 2021. No new Itanium processors are made, so spares for an Integrity host come from the used and refurbished market.

Two engineers at a wide monitor wall in a quiet control room
Illustrative only: a generated image, not a photograph of any system named here.

HPE ended standard support for its last Integrity models, the i4 and i6, at the end of 2025. Wikipedia's entry on HPE Integrity Servers, which cites an HPE notice, says OpenVMS is now the only operating system for Integrity servers that still receives active support. Three moves are often confused. Emulating runs an older system's software on different hardware through a software layer. Re-hosting moves a system to a new host. Porting rebuilds the application from its source on a new platform.

Four colleagues around a long table looking at a shared laptop in a bright office
Illustrative only: a generated image of a team reviewing one screen, showing no particular estate.

Emulating and porting each depend on something specific, and the questions below take those in turn.

Taking these notes into the decision

These notes stop at mechanics. The decision helper on our-offering.html asks about the system, the application, the source and the downtime a business can tolerate, then narrows the result to keep, host or migrate, and says where an answer could push either way.

The glossary defines the terms a reader hears in this subject, with the places where they are easy to confuse. It ranks no providers.

Where readers stall, and what the sources say

Does standard HP-UX support still cover an 11i v3 system?
Not on HPE Integrity. Standard support for HP-UX 11i v3 there ended on 31 December 2025, and the reduced tier that follows is reported to run through at least 31 December 2028, citing HPE's support matrix.
Is Linux on Itanium a way off HP-UX?
Not to a maintained platform. Linux kernel 6.7 accepted a patch removing IA-64 support, and GCC 15 stops building IA-64 binaries, as The Register reported in April 2024.
Can an emulator carry an Integrity HP-UX system?
The sources found do not show it. Stromasys's own page on Charon-PAR describes emulating PA-RISC systems running HP-UX, and covers PA-RISC only. That is a vendor claim.
Does porting need the source code?
It depends on having the source to rebuild. A 2022 article on the OpenVMS 9.2 launch lists Itanium-hosted cross compilers for FORTRAN 90, BLISS, COBOL, Pascal and C. A site without source needs a different plan.
Does moving an Oracle database change its byte order?
It can. Oracle's documentation lists HP-UX IA 64-bit as big-endian and Linux x86 64-bit as little-endian. Data moved between them must be converted to the target format, which adds a step to the cutover plan.

Working through an Integrity question in order

  1. Record the operating system, its release and the CPU family as the system runs today, and compare the HP-UX release with the 2505.11iv3 level named above.
  2. Establish whether the source code and a build environment exist, because a rebuild depends on both.
  3. Check whether any data crosses a byte-order boundary, and whether the cutover window can take a conversion step.
  4. Write down the support dates for the current platform, and whether the plan runs past them.
  5. Check the target against VSI's release notes for OpenVMS x86-64 V9.2-3, which name KVM, VMware and VirtualBox as guest hypervisors and say a system will not boot if a CPU feature check fails.
  6. Take the answers to our-offering.html, the helper that returns keep, host or migrate with its reasoning printed beside the result.