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TECH ONTAP HOME PAGE — FEBRUARY 2006
Paul Hargreaves
Paul Hargreaves
Consulting Systems Engineer and Simulator Junkie, NetApp
A six-year NetApp veteran, Paul is a NetApp expert on Windows® environments and has helped many of the largest companies in the United Kingdom develop their storage strategies. In his spare time, Paul helped write the scripts and documentation for the Data ONTAP® simulator and regularly engages Engineering on updates to the "kernel" of the simulator. When asked why a Windows specialist is involved with a Linux® tool, Paul cites his previous history with Dragon, Spectrum, and Commodore operating systems before commenting, "I've used so many operating systems I've lost count. It doesn't matter what the OS is—this is a really valuable tool."
February's Tool of the Month:
Data ONTAP Simulator for Linux

Author: Network Appliance Engineering

What it is: A tool that gives you the experience of administering and using a NetApp storage system with all the features of Data ONTAP at your disposal.

How it works: The simulator can be loaded onto a Red Hat or SuSE Linux box and looks and feels exactly like Data ONTAP. It has the same code base (with additional wrappers to simulate the hardware) and is included in Engineering's nightly build process. The simulator is available for Data ONTAP 6.4.5 through 7.1RC2.

Why it's cool: Almost anything you can do with Data ONTAP can be done with the simulator. Without purchasing new hardware or impacting your production environment, you can test functionality, export NFS and CIFS shares, set up fake tape drives, and even simulate two heads on the same box for clustering.

I'm working with NetApp customers using this for...

  • Data ONTAP feature testing. The simulator includes fully functional license keys for all NetApp software. You can create WORM-protected files using SnapLock® and a simulated set of populated disks, and after the test you just delete the files instead of throwing away drives. You can test NetApp SAN functionality using iSCSI before implementing in a production FC or iSCSI SAN environment. You can also experiment with features such as FlexVol™ and FlexClone™ before deploying Data ONTAP 7.0 on production systems.
  • Application integration. Application developers use the simulator to experiment with and develop applications that use Manage ONTAP™ APIs. The Manage ONTAP SDK (software development kit) contains documentation and C/C++, Java™, and Perl libraries.
  • Bug fix testing. The simulator can be used to confirm that a new release fixes a previous issue without having to physically touch a production machine. Assuming the bug fix is proven, you can test it on real hardware and know that time isn't being wasted with upgrades and downgrades.
  • Education. Every admin on your team can have a personal testing environment.

Caveats: This is not a production version of Data ONTAP and should not be used in your production environment. There are inefficiencies (for example, a 1GB disk file will be much larger than 1GB) and performance running on another OS without a disk system behind it will obviously be considerably less than with Data ONTAP. Finally, the simulator can't emulate environments where specific hardware is required (for example, Fibre Channel).

Data ONTAP simulator download
Data ONTAP simulator support forum
(Password required for both sites, customers only.)
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Sample Simulator Screens:
Sample Simulator Screens
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