HP Integrity Virtual Machines 4.3: Installation, Configuration, Administration

5 Creating HP OpenVMS Guests
The following sections contain the release notes specific to OpenVMS guests.
For information about installing OpenVMS guests, see the HP OpenVMS V8.4 for Integrity Servers
Upgrade and Installation Guide at the following website: OpenVMS Documentation.
5.1 Minimum Processor Requirement for OpenVMS Guests
OpenVMS guests are supported on Integrity VM Host systems with Intel® Itanium® 2 9000/9100
Series processors or later processors that OpenVMS supports natively.
The following example shows the results of creating or starting a guest on a processor that does
not support OpenVMS:
# hpvmstart -P g1
HPVM guest g1 configuration problems:
Warning 1: OpenVMS guests not supported on this host's CPU.
These problems may prevent HPVM guest g1 from starting.
If you do not specify the OpenVMS operating system type, -O openvms, when booting an
OpenVMS ISO installation media, you receive the following:
# hpvmconsole -P g1
[g1] vMP> co
fs2:
fs2:\> \efi\boot\bootia64
................................................................................
.....................................................
%VMS_LOADER-W-Unable to identify primary console device.
> Select a primary console from the Boot Configuration Menu.
> Attempting to continue with a default console device.
*** VM shutdown ***
*** OpenVMS not supported ***
5.2 Minimum VM Host Page Size
The OpenVMS guest might have problems booting if one or more of the following occurs:
• The VM Host is under memory pressure due to frequent allocations and freeing large
amounts of memory.
• The VM Host has just enough physical memory to support the guest's requirements and the
VM Host's base_pagesize is set to 4K.
OpenVMS expects a guest pagesize of 8K, and the boot processing can have issues loading an
in-memory disk used during the boot process. If either of the following situations occur, setting
the VM Host's base_pagesize to 64K or setting the guest's preferred pagesize to 8K should resolve
the problem:
• The following message is written to the VM Host's /var/opt/hpvm/common/
hpvm_mon_log file:
# WARNING: Host memory is fragmented.
# Reducing VHPT preferred page size from 64K to K.
# This may result in degraded performance for this virtual machine.
Where # is a guest vm number assigned by hpvmdvr.
• Depending on how fragmented and how small the VM Host pagesizes are, the following
OpenVMS error message and text appear on the guest’s console:
%SYSBOOT-F-LDFAIL, unable to load SYS$PUBLIC_VECTORS.EXE, status = 00000044
**************************************************************
* Exception taken before exception handler has been loaded! *
* Unable to take crashdump. *
5.1 Minimum Processor Requirement for OpenVMS Guests 79