There are two significant variants of VMS in existence. One is VMS for VAXen and the other is OpenVMS for Alphas. The FASTLINK distribution includes separate instructions for these two versions. The availability of these instructions is largely due to the super effort of three adventuresome FASTLINK users, Steve Roberts in the United Kingdom, Kimmo Kallio in Finland, and Anita Destefano in the U.S., and to Shriram Krishnamurthi, a student at Rice. Steve provided instructions for VAXen and Kimmo for Alphas. All three users did extensive testing and troubleshooting. Thanks to Steve, Kimmo, and Anita!
You can find the top level instructions for VAX/VMS in README.VAX and they refer to some files in fastlink/3.0P/vaxvms, where fastlink is the top level directory created when you untar FASTLINK. Caution: I am using UNIX syntax for subdirectories here; you need to adapt this to VMS syntax. You can find the top level instructions for OpenVMS in README.ALPHAVMS and they refer to some files in fastlink/3.0P/alphavms.
More user input on simplifying the FASTLINK port to VMS, making it work with more compilers, and testing checkpointing would be very much appreciated.