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 8.0.
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.
System Requirement Data ONTAP 7G (7.x.x) simulators
* Server /PC with Single network card, 128 MB main memory minimum (512 MB recommended), 250MB free hard disk space (minimum) Disk space of 5GB would be better for simple testing purpose. More disks you need then you need have ~30GB
* Linux installed, running, and networked (Works on Red Hat Linux 7.1 through 9.0, SUSE 8.1 and 8.2) any Linux Operating System (32 bit)
* Installer must be logged on as root
Data ONTAP 8G (8.x) simulators * Hardware requirements o Dual core 64-bit Intel® or AMD architecture laptop or desktop
o 2 GB RAM for one instance of simulator
o 3 GB RAM for two instances of simulator (4 GB recommended)
o 20 GB free disk space per instance of simulator
o VT support for Intel® based systems
* Software requirements o For a Windows system
+ Microsoft Windows® XP
+ VMware® Server or VMware® Workstation or VMware® Player
o For a Mac system
+ Mac OS X Version 10.4.11 or higher
+ VMware Fusion™ 2.03 or higher
