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From: LEICHTER-JERRY@YALE.ARPA
Newsgroups: mod.computers.vax
Subject: Re: 8700+8600+785=one8085 one ONE common system disk ?
Message-ID: <8610301222.AA01975@ucbvax.berkeley.edu>
Date: Thu, 30-Oct-86 07:40:25 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8610301222.AA01975
Posted: Thu Oct 30 07:40:25 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 30-Oct-86 23:27:53 EST
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    At the moment we have three VAXes forming a cluster in the following way:
    
    VAX785 + VAX8600        common system disk      VMS 4.3
    VAX8700                 separate system disk    VMS 4.4

    As soon as possible we want to have all three beasts on one common system
    disk together forming a cluster running VMS 4.4.  DEC can't tell us if a
    VAX8700 can be clustered on one common system disk together with our
    (old-fashioned?) other two VAXes.  There seems to be a reason that an 8800
    can't be run that way.

    I have two questions now:
    a.      Can we safely upgrade to VMS 4.4 and use one common system disk
            for the 3 VAXes?
    b.      If not, why not?
I know of nothing the would prevent you from building a cluster with any mix
of old and new hardware.  The only possible problem that might arise is if
some of the older systems were running software that didn't support the newer
hardware; for example, 4.3 probably doesn't support the 8700.  However, since
you are intending to upgrade everything to 4.4 anyway, that should be an
issue.

For an 8800, you'd have to be sure to turn on multiprocessing on the 8800
but not on the other cluster members.  With an 8700, that's not an issue
either.
							-- Jerry
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