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The Question is: I have been asked to propose a way of replacing the disks that exist in a cluster comprising of a VAX 4500 and two m3100 systems. Current disks are a mixture of scsi and dssi with all systems mounting all disks within the cluster. I thought that a small a lpha using a storage array would provide a good platform to mscp serve disks the cluster. What implications are there for a cluster running 5.5-2 if a new node was added running a much newer vms version ? The new node would only serve disks and would not participate in the cluster in any other way. The Answer is : You will need a second system disk -- OpenVMS Cluster configurations can have one or more system disks, and OpenVMS Cluster configurations with a mixture of VAX and Alpha systems will have two or more system disks. You will be limited to 8.5 GB disk volumes or smaller, due to limits present in all OpenVMS VAX releases prior to V6.0 -- please see the discussion in the OpenVMS Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for some further details. There is no "partial" participation of a member in an OpenVMS Cluster, all nodes are full members. Nodes may or may not share system disks or serve disks or tapes, but all member nodes are full members. You will need to operate with a version of OpenVMS Alpha that is compatible with the locally-required release of OpenVMS VAX, or you will need to upgrade the OpenVMS VAX systems to a more recent OpenVMS release. There are a few minor restrictions around such things as SYSMAN use, as older SYSMAN implementations do not know how to communicate with newer SYSMAN -- though newer SYSMAN can communicate with older SYSMAN. You will also want to ensure that all account and system management is performed from OpenVMS VAX V6.1 or later or from OpenVMS Alpha V6.2 or later, if these or later versions are configured. Additional information is in the OpenVMS release notes and new features manuals. When choosing an OpenVMS Alpha system for this configuration, remember to compare the minimum OpenVMS Alpha supported release for the system with the OpenVMS Cluster release compatibility matrix, to ensure that the system can coexist in an OpenVMS Cluster with the existing OpenVMS versions -- unless an upgrade is feasible.
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