I liked VMS in the 1980s. I have an account for it at the Living Computer Museum, and occasionally I play around a bit.
But why would I seriously want to use that in 2022? What does it do better than Linux?
But why would I seriously want to use that in 2022? What does it do better than Linux?
Unlike a typical Linux deployment, these operating system components were designed and tested as a whole, so the system tends to have little if any issues when dealing with unusual circumstances.
Enterprise deployments for things like factories, nuclear reactors, water plants, live cable TV stations, and 911 call centers require a level of stability that you can't get with things like RHEL or Windows.
I don't mean reliability, I mean stability. The Linux kernel is reliable, OpenVMS is reliable, but a typical Linux distribution is made up of a hundred components constantly churning on different release schedules, whereas it's normal to take a 20 year old Alpha binary written in 3 different languages and expect it to run on Itanium or x64 using an OS that's 2 major versions ahead.
Just like z/OS or NonStop, it's entirely reasonable to have deployments which never patch the underlying operating system, and even ones that do patch regularly do so on a far less frequent basis, with a well-defined procedure to canary the changes to avoid taking down production.
The job control and batch queues built into the OS allow for some really powerful workflows and I can't think of a way to replicate that in Linux without a lot of extra software that needs to be maintained.
Source code management and file versioning built into the OS and all the triggers and customization you can do would enable some really interesting CI/CD without a need for any extra software.
But I still wouldn't procure a brand-new OpenVMS server and start a business with it.
Why have a solution when there's good money to be made kicking the problem down the road and all that