The Scope Record

Glossary: the HP-UX and OpenVMS terms a vendor will use on you

Vendors and consultants use these words to frame a decision. Each entry says what a word means, when it matters and what it is easy to confuse it with. It recommends nothing and ranks no provider.

Why a term matters before a quote arrives

A word like migration can mean a port, a re-host or an emulation, and each one carries different work and different risk. Read a proposal with that question in mind. We use the vendor and independent documents named in this glossary as the reference for each term.

When a proposal says migrate, ask whether it means a port, a re-host or an emulation, and whether the source code exists, before anyone prices the work.

The Scope Record

Each term below is defined in plain words first, then tied to the point where it changes the outcome.

Terms that describe the hardware

Integrity servers are the HPE hardware line that runs HP-UX and OpenVMS on Itanium processors. HPE ended standard support for its final Integrity models, the i4 and i6, at the end of 2025, according to the HPE Integrity Servers reference article, which cites an HPE notice. Confirm the date against that notice before a plan depends on it.

Two people shaking hands across a desk
A handshake is how a sales conversation looks. It says nothing about the platform underneath, so check the terms before agreeing to anything.

Itanium is the processor family itself. Intel's final Itanium 9700 order and shipment were scheduled for 30 January 2020 and 29 July 2021, as The Register reported in 2019. No new Itanium processors exist, so spares for an Integrity host come from the used and refurbished market.

A small office desk with two monitors and a rolled-up magazine
A generated image of an office desk. It depicts no real system, company or product.

Cloud hosting needs the same care. On OpenVMS it means bare-metal instances with a hypervisor you manage, not a managed OpenVMS service, as AWS's walkthrough for OpenVMS on EC2 describes.

Terms that describe how a system moves

Emulation runs software built for one processor on another by software translation, so the program itself does not change. Stromasys's guide to moving HP-UX to Azure with lift and shift describes its Charon-PAR product as emulating historic PA-RISC systems running HP-UX on modern hardware. That page covers PA-RISC only, so an Integrity HP-UX estate needs a separate answer from the vendor, and any claim on it stays a vendor claim until it is confirmed for your release.

Re-hosting moves the same operating system and application to another machine or a virtual machine without changing the code. Porting changes the code so that it builds for a new platform, which needs the source. At the 2022 OpenVMS 9.2 launch, Itanium-hosted cross compilers covered Fortran 90, BLISS, COBOL, Pascal and C, as the 2022 planning article on OpenVMS 9.2 reports. That list is a 2022 snapshot, so check it against current VSI documentation.

Pairs that get confused

Big-endian and little-endian
These describe byte order, the order in which a number's bytes are stored. Oracle's data transport documentation lists HP-UX IA (64-bit) as big-endian and Linux x86 64-bit as little-endian, so moving datafiles between them needs a conversion step.
Bare metal and hypervisor
Bare metal means an operating system runs directly on the server, with no hypervisor between them. A hypervisor runs virtual machines on one physical host. As The Register reported in April 2024, OpenVMS 9 supported bare-metal operation on one HPE server model, the ProLiant DL380 Gen9, and expected everything else to run under a hypervisor.
Guest platforms
A guest is the virtual machine itself. The OpenVMS x86-64 V9.2-3 release notes name KVM, VMware and VirtualBox as supported ways to install it as a guest, and they do not list Hyper-V as a tested guest platform.

Putting a term to work in a conversation

Ask for the term in writing

When a proposal uses one of these words, ask the sender to write down what it means for your release and your hardware. A written definition is easier to compare across proposals than a spoken one.

Test the word against your own system

Write down the operating system and release, the CPU family and the type of application. Read each term against those three facts. A term that fits one of them and not the others is the one to question first.

Treat an undated claim as unfinished

Support, hardware and licence terms all carry dates. A claim with no date is not yet a basis for a decision, so ask for the date before weighing the claim against the others.

Check the terms at the source