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.

Further information and support:

• Please refer to the Stromasys Product Documentation and Knowledge Base for more information and up-to-date versions of the documentation.
• A service contract with Stromasys is required to receive support directly from Stromasys. Please refer to the Stromasys support page for contact information and information about the different support options. 

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 Charon-PAR is a hardware virtualization layer running under Linux on industry standard servers. It covers emulates a range of HP's HP3000 and HP9000 servers and provides the ability for any existing HP3000 or HP9000 user historic 64-bit and 32-bit PA-RISC hardware and allows existing users of such systems 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 PAR products are essentially HALs of complete HP3000 or HP9000 systemslegacy hardware, including their its PCI-based I/O devices. They are precise models of HP3000 and HP9000 the legacy hardware, and contain modules which emulate the HP3000 and HP9000 PA-RISC legacy hardware CPUs, console subsystem, buses and I/O adapters, disks and tapes.

The installation of Charon-HPA PAR on a general purpose host platform provides an exact model of a working HP3000 or HP9000 systemthe historic PA-RISC hardware. On this 'virtual' system you install your HP3000 or HP9000 legacy 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 PAR 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:

Image Removed

...

Image Added