Back in the 1980s I used spend a fair amount of work time in rooms with a VAX and can attest to their powerful and noisy fans. If you are a pro with a VAX, you had better be a fan liker.
Personally I never much liked VAX myself, but that was primarily because my first experience of it was with VMS, and I'd previously used Unix. The difference was jarring.
Later in my career, I had no choice but to use VMS on an Alpha cluster, and grew to really appreciate it.