ONTAP Simulator is a great little tool. It allows us to simulate Data ONTAP in a Linux environment. Almost all of the ONTAP features are available in the simulator. Currently, my VMware fusion environment looks like this:
- VM running CentOS 5.1 linux. Inside it, I have
- 5 ONTAP Simulators – two in a cluster setup and three as individual storage systems
- VM running FreeBSD with Dummynet
- VM running XP
One of the individual simulators is directly connected to the FreeBSD network. This allows me to simulate slow network connections between two NetApp Storage Systems using dummynet. It is not quite accurate but works with about 20% margin of error. It is great to test SnapMirror and A-SIS stuff. The other two simulators can be used for all other purposes.
All of these are bridged connections so I can access these from the other systems on the network. They use DHCP and get addresses from the LAN DHCP Server.
Having said all that, I needed to mount the simulator shares from the parent Linux system. By design and by default, it is not possible. By default, the linux system’s network interface is eth0 and the simulators are using this inteface to simulate their own network interfaces (ns0).
One workaround is to simply add a new network interface to the CentOS and use that interface to configure the simulators. If you already have simulators up and running, just re-run setup from the simulator directory. You should be all set. This will allow for NFS/CIFS/iSCSI access between the parent linux system and the simulators.
Earlier, I said “almost all of ONTAP features are available in the simulator”. Now a word about that. Currently, one cannot test A-SIS (FAS Deduplication) and FC funtionality inside the simulator. However, iSCSI can be used to test block protocol functionality and for A-SIS, there is a internal tool available to simulate de-duplication. I heard that the nearstore funtionality is being integrated into the simulator and once that is available, simulator users can also test A-SIS features.