Or boot a linux directly from CD and mount a rw partition (e.g. over NFS) which contains the simulator files ...

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

ok

-----Original Message----- From: Bokkelkamp Ernst [mailto:ernst.bokkelkamp@siemens.com] Sent: Donnerstag, 19. Juni 2003 19:21 To: Merkin, David S; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: ONTAP Simulator available on NOW

Yes,

However, you will need a VMWare extension to Windows XP.

To be honest, if you have a spare outdated computer standing around then it is easy to install linux and then to run the simulator on it. You do not need much linux knowledge to get it to work, even if you have never installed linux it should only take a few hours to learn how to install a mininal system that is sufficient for the simulator.

This week I installed SuSE 8.0 Profession with minimal system on a Pentium 90 with 48 MB RAM and a 800MB IDE harddisk to be able to run the simulator. This machine is a bit low on memory, but I decided to try it before adding a bit more RAM. But the simulator runs, although with a lot of disk activity due to paging. It might be old and slow, but it is sufficient for me if I want to check something and I believe that it will work good enough if I find some RAM in my junkbox.

I also installed a minimal linux on an old AMD K6-2 333Mhz with 128MB and 6 GB Harddisk. This system runs the simulator perfectly without any complaints.

The interesting part is that I also installed a minimal linux on a machine with an AMD Duron 1300, 256MB and a fast 40GB harddisk but the performance jump from the AMD K6-2 isn't that noticable. Actually this machine was the most difficult to install due to a problem with the mainboard under linux.

If you would like to give it a try then I suggest you join the simulator mailing list where I can help you to get linux to work, but please note: I don't know much about linux, my specialisation is Windows 2000.

Bye Ernst

-----Original Message----- From: Merkin, David S [mailto:david.merkin@gs.com] Sent: Thursday, June 19, 2003 5:26 PM To: 'Dave Hitz'; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: ONTAP Simulator available on NOW

Does this work on different OS's other than Linux? Can the Simulater be installed on XP?

Thanks, David

-----Original Message----- From: Dave Hitz [mailto:hitz@netapp.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2003 9:29 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: ONTAP Simulator available on NOW

Some of you may know that NetApp Engineering uses an ONTAP Simulator as part of our development process. (The simulator runs all of ONTAP as a process under Linux. At a very low level, we spoof the disk drivers, so that disks are simulated by local files. We spoof the network drivers by putting the Linux Ethernet card into promiscuous mode and creating a fake MAC address associated with the simulator.)

Enough technical details.

The point of this message is that we are now making the simulator available to customers so that they can experiment with ONTAP features and commands without putting production systems at risk. I have had many customers tell me that they wished they had a way to play with new releases and new features, but they didn't have a safe place to do it.

Just to be clear: This is not production software. It's ONTAP running on top of Linux, so don't use it for performance testing. We have no formal support program. Don't call NetApp support. This is an "as is" tool. (Some restrictions may apply. :-)

On the other hand, I think you will find the simulator to be very useful for experimenting with ONTAP. Hundreds of NetApp engineers use it every day, and we have been using the simulator for over a year in NetApp training classes. Not only can you experiment with the features of a single filer, but you can run multiple simulators and experiment with features like SnapMirror, SnapVault, and Cluster Fail Over. It doesn't support Fibre Channel, because that would take more hardware, but it does support iSCSI and all of the other TCP/IP protocols, including NFS, CIFS, HTTP and FTP, as well as network management protocols like SNMP and NDMP.

Here are some details:

You can download the simulator from NOW at http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/simulator.

We have created a category in the NOW community forums called "ONTAP Simulator" that can be accessed at http://forums.netapp.com/showcategory.asp?cid=172.

And finally, we have created a majordomo mailing list that people can join at xdl-simulator@netapp.com. (You know the drill. To join send to majordomo@netapp.com, not to the simulator list itself.)

And of course, feel free to talk about it here on toasters.

As I said above, the simulator is NOT formally supported, but some volunteers at NetApp have agreed to informally answer questions to the xdl-simulator mailing list.

Have fun!

Dave Hitz Founder and EVP Engineering, Network Appliance