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

Apart from the PDP emulator which is only available for Windows, all emulators are available for Linux and Windows host systems.

Please note: this guide is focused on an implementation on Linux.

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 (available for all products)
• 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.
  • 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.

Marketplace image availability at the time of writing:

• AWS:
  • Charon-SSP: AL, VE
  • Charon-PAR: VE planned
  • Charon-AXP/VAX: VE planned
• Azure:
  • Charon-SSP: VE
• OCI
  • Charon-SSP: AL (US-only)
• GCP
  • Charon-SSP: VE planned

VE license server availability at the time of writing:

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

• Cloud platforms
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP
  • OCI
  • IBM
  • Nutanix
• VMware
• Physical servers

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 (planned, Linux only)