Contents

About this Document

 This document covers Charon-HPA version 2.00. For older versions, please refer to the documentation included with the respective installation package.

This user's guide covers all aspects of selecting a suitable environment (hardware and software) to run the Charon-HPA emulator. It also describes all tasks involved with installing,
configuring, and running the Charon-HPA emulator.

The following topics are not covered by this guide:

• While this document will cover guest system specific configuration aspects where required, it does not cover the management of the guest system (MPE/iX and HP-UX).
• It also does not cover the migration of a physical HP server system to an emulated system. If you require migration support, please contact your Stromasys representative or a Stromasys partner.

Intended Audience

This document is intended to be used by any end-user or Stromasys partner required to install, configure, and manage a Charon-HPA installation. It is assumed that a user of this document has a basic knowledge of managing Linux systems and is familiar with the guest operating system used.

General Description

Charon-HPA is a hardware virtualization layer running under Linux on industry standard servers. It covers a range of HP's HP3000 and HP9000 servers and provides the ability for any existing HP3000 or HP9000 user to move to modern Intel-based server hardware.

Modern software operating systems contain a hardware abstraction layer (HAL). The HAL creates a software layer on top of the hardware to "virtualize" the functionality of the hardware components. The Charon-HPA products are essentially HALs of complete HP3000 or HP9000 systems, including their PCI-based I/O devices. They are precise models of HP3000 and HP9000 hardware, and contain modules which emulate the HP3000 and HP9000 PA-RISC CPUs, console subsystem, buses and I/O adapters, disks and tapes.

The installation of Charon-HPA on a general purpose host platform provides an exact model of a working HP3000 or HP9000 system. On this 'virtual' system you install your HP3000 or HP9000 operating system and the associated applications, just as though you were using the original hardware. In most cases, no changes of the software are required. The Charon-HPA emulated systems run
the same binary HP3000 and HP9000 code and the same I/O drivers as the original hardware. This is illustrated in the following image:

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