Emulator Concepts

The Charon emulator products allow users of SPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha, and VAX legacy systems to replace their native hardware in a way that requires little or no change to the original system configuration. This means you can continue to run your applications and data without the need to switch or port to another platform. The Charon emulator software runs on commodity, x86 64-bit systems ensuring the continued protection of your investment.

The image below shows the basic concept of migrating physical hardware to an emulator:

Charon Emulator Products

Stromasys currently provides the following emulator products:

• Charon-AXP/VAX (including PDP)
• Charon-SSP
• Charon-PAR

Please note: this guide is focused on an implementation on Linux.Therefore, it will not deal with the PDP emulator which is only available on Microsoft Windows.

General Installation Options for Emulators on Linux Cloud Instances

In general there are the following installation options for emulator products on Linux hosts in the cloud:

• Installation using RPM packages. This option is available for all products. The products were tested on AWS, GCP, Azure, Nutanix, and OCI. However, there may still be requirements of a legacy operating system that cloud environments cannot provide. Please contact your Stromasys representative for more information to discuss potential limitations, and if you would like to run Charon in a different Cloud environment.
• Installation based on Stromasys-provided marketplace images in selected clouds (not available for all products and all clouds). Such marketplace images include the Linux host operating system and the Charon emulator product. They can be provided for two different types of product licensing:
  • Automatic Licensing (AL) for which billing of cloud instance and Charon product is handled by the cloud provider. Public license servers for this option are operated by Stromasys (private AutoVE licensing with customer-operated license server is possible as an alternative).
  • Virtual Environment Licensing (VE) for which the billing of the cloud instance is handled by the cloud provider, the billing for the Charon product is handled by Stromasys or its partners. The license server is operated by the customer.

For up-to-date availability information of marketplace images (in particular for AL marketplace images), please contact your Stromasys representatives.

At the time of writing the VE license server provided by Stromasys was available for Linux systems running on the following platforms:

VE licensing availability for Charon emulator products at the time of writing:

At the time of writing, the following Charon emulator products supported VE licensing:

• Charon-SSP
• Charon-PAR
• Charon-AXP/VAX (Linux only)

Management Options for Charon Emulator Instances in the Cloud

All Charon emulators running on a Linux host can be managed from the command-line.

Stromasys provides additional management tools for the different products. Availability of these products in cloud environments:

• Charon-SSP: the Charon Manager and the Charon Director fully support cloud-based Charon instances.
• Charon-PAR and Charon-AXP/VAX: at the time of writing, the Linux toolkit was not fully cloud-enabled yet. A new version supporting cloud-relevant features is planned (no release date known at the time of writing) and will be made available by Stromasys via the normal software distribution channels.