Diary of a Bad Golfer

One of the things I really like about NetApp is the fact that they have an ONTAP simulator, which is surprisingly powerful. I have used it a lot in the past for POC testing. I use it in VMware Workstation 6 with a minimal Debian install (no GUI). After installing the simulator (available from NetApp’s NOW site) it comes with 2 100mb disks. To add more disks there is a script in the /sim directory to run. I used this process to add 8 1000mb disks to my simulator.

/sim/makedisks -n 8 -t 5

Note: If you want to add a different type/size of disk, open up the makedisks script to see the available options.

Once that is done run the simulator with /sim/runsim.sh

After you login to the simulator, the new disks will show up as failed, follow this process to fix.

priv set diag
disk unfail -s v
disk zero spares

Once you are done, type priv set to exit from the diagnostic mode.

Once that is complete you can create a new aggregate using the 1000mb disks you have created. It probably goes without saying but since it is just a simulator uncheck the box for Double Parity when creating the aggregate so you can maximize your storage. Thanks to the NetApp Simulator and being able to use ESX on VMware Workstation I am able to have 2 ESX servers in a cluster with DRS/HA using SAN storage from 2 NetApp Simulators that replicate between each other with SnapMirror - extremely useful for learning.