Unitek NetApp Training Blog

Your Netapp simulator is now operational. It has a name and an IP address and you should now be able to access it through Filerview.

If you go to your web browser and enter the IP address of your filer you should see something like this:

At this point, we’re interested in the entry “Documentation specific to the simulator”. Select that option. You will see the following options:

The one we’re going to look at first is license keys. Take a look.

Here are simulator specific license keys for most of the Netapp product line. Notice there are keys for ISCSI but not FCP. FCP is one of the few products the filer does not support, but there are plenty of others. Clustering is supported, snapmirror, multistore, flexclone, snaprestore, snapvault … pretty much everything is here.

Go to your console and type license:

Notice that licenses are already installed for CIFS, NFS, ISCSI and snaprestore.

Next let’s go back to “documentation specific to the simulator” options and then select “frequently asked questions.”

There is a lot of good information here as well as on the installation instructions screen.

We’re going to take a look at the first one, converting vol0 from RAID 0 to RAID 4, next time. If you go to your console, or better yet, a telnet session into your simulator and type “sysconfig –r” you should see something like this:

Notice that first group of disks in aggr0. The RAID type is RAID0. Ordinarily (unless you are using a vfiler) you would not see aggregates with a raid type of RAID zero. They should be RAID 4 or RAID DP. To help keep the image size of the simulator smaller, (there is no parity information) Netapp has made the aggregate that supports /vol/vol0 RAID type 0.

In the interests of making the simulator behave closer to a real hardware storage controller our next project will be making a boot volume on an aggregate with normal RAID support. Also, we will be replacing the 126 MB drives with 526 MB drives.

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Your Netapp simulator is now operational, but there are still a couple of things to do.

As it sits, you have not configured the network. The Linux window where you have been working is effectively the console. This is the window where you ran the command:

/sim/runsim.sh

This may be a window in your Linux GUI, or it may be a telnet window. Remember, if you close this window the process associated with your simulator will be killed, so you must keep this window open. If you are ever in doubt about the status of your simulator process you can use the following command:

ps –ef | grep maytag.L

You should see a line which includes the word “maytag.L” plus the command line options which are passed to the maytag command through the runsim.sh script. This is the simulator process running within Linux.

From your simulator’s command line enter the following command:

ifconfig –a

You should see something like this, except you may not have addresses in place.

Notice the name of the network devices. Normally you would see device names like e0a. The simulated Ethernet ports are named ns0 and ns1. Although the names are different, they are configured just like normal Data ONTAP network devices.

At this point we are ready to run the setup command. Just like a real Netapp storage system, the setup script will be start automatically if there is no /etc/rc file on your storage controller. It will walk you through setting up your network configuration.

Initially you will be prompted to name your storage system. Then you will be asked if you want to setup virtual interfaces. I usually answer no to this question. You will then be asked for the address of ns0 and its net mask, followed by the same information for ns1. You will need to provide the appropriate information for your network environment. It is not necessary to configure ns1 at this point if you don’t want to.

Next you are asked if you want to continue configuration to the web interface. I usually answer no and continue with the command line. You will be asked for a default gateway address. Enter the correct gateway, or default router, for your environment.

Then you will be asked for the address of your administrative host. This is the computer from which you intend to administer your storage system. It can be either a Windows or a UNIX host machine. The script will add this machine as a trusted host in the /etc/hosts.equiv file.

You will be asked to enter your time zone and language. You can make selections appropriate for your environment.

We are almost to the end. You will be asked if you want to run the DNS resolver. I usually answer this yes. Finally you wild be asked for your DNS domain name and be given the opportunity to enter up to three name servers. Last you will be asked if you want to run NIS. At this time, enter no.

Your setup is complete.

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This is where we left off. The install script prompted us through creating virtual disks that will be used by the simulator.

The install script leaves us with the instructions for starting the simulator, so let’s start the simulator with the command:

/sim/runsim.sh

(This may vary if you installed the simulator in a different directory.) You will see a great many error messages as the simulator starts. Most of these are related to the disks that we created. You should see raid.config.disk.bad.label:error messages for each disk. Finally you will end up at the login prompt. Go ahead and log in as root.

Once you are logged in, type the command “sysconfig –r” and you will see something like this:

This shows the new disks that we created during the install. Notice they all have “bad label” under the RAID disk column.

To repair the disk we will need to use an advanced mode command, so enter the command “priv set advanced”.

You will get a warning message after entering the command and then the command line prompt will change to indicate that you are no longer in administrative mode. Also notice the “Device” column from the previous. This indicates the device names for the new drives we created with the install script. These names are different from what you would see on real hardware, reflecting the fact that you are using the simulator.

Type the command “disk unfail –s v4.19” to repair the disk label for device 4.19. You should see the following response:

Disk v4.19 will be placed in the spare pool. You will need to run this command for each disk. Once you have run the disk unfail command for each drive you, run “sysconfig –r” again. You should see something like the following output:

The first column output should now indicate that the disks are spares. Now type the command “disk zero spares”.

If you wait a few minutes and type “sysconfig –r” you should see output similar to the following:

The drives are now being zeroed. One this is complete, the drives will be ready to include in aggregates or traditional volumes. (You don’t have to pre-zero the drives, but if you try to use a non-zero drive, Data ONTAP will zero the drives before inserting them into RAID groups for your aggregates.

It is possible you may get an error while this process is running. Until now the virtual disk did not take much physical space. When the zeroing process is complete, the virtual disk will exist physically as files within your Linux system, taking the same amount of space as the virtual disks you selected. Make sure you have enough free space to support the combination drive size and number of drives you selected during the install.

When the drive zeroing process completes, NetApp Data ONTAP will indicate it is done with the following messages:

Finally, if you type “sysconfig –r” you should see the following output:

The drives are now in the spare pool and ready to use.

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Installing your simulatorOnce you have downloaded the simulator you are ready to install. First you need a Linux host. Earlier versions of the sim – before 7.0 – required Red Hat 7.1. They would not run on anything else. Since Data ONTAP 7.0 and later the simulator has run on every version of Linux that I have tried. This has included Red Hat, various Red Hat Clones, Suse Linux as well as Debian.

In addition, the system running Linux should have two Ethernet interfaces. They can be real physical interfaces or, if you are running in a vm, they can be virtual interfaces configured as part of the virtual machine.

The reason for this is that Data ONTAP will take control of an interface that will be used for the simulated storage system. At install time it will ask you which interface to use. The default is Eth0. Therefore you will need another interface to communicate to the Linux system. (Usually Eth1, if you accept the default.)

The install:

Once you have downloaded the simulator tgz file from Netapp and copied it to your Linux box, you are ready to begin. The simulator must run with root privileges, so I usually do the entire install with the root account.

Go to the directory were you loaded the simulator file and run the following commands:

gunzip 7.2-tarfile-v22.tgz
tar xvf 7.2-tarfile-v22.tar

The file you downloaded may have a different name. If so, substitute the file names that correspond to the file you downloaded
Usually there is a script called is setup.sh which will create your simulator. Enter the following command:

./setup.sh

This will walk you through the setup.

As you notice from the script output above, you have the option of installing the simulator as a cluster. Later we will make use of this feature, but for now I did not install as a cluster.

Notice we were given an option of which host interface to use. I took the default: Eth0. Generally the default memory size of 128 is adequate but you can assign more if you’d like.

Finally we are given the option of installing more disks. The simulator has 3 disks already, but they are only 100 MB virtual disks. To do anything useful, we will need more space. Although the disks are virtual, the space the take within you Linux host is real, so you may need to adjust this to fit the storage situation on your Linux host.

I added 11 drives, filling out my virtual shelf. I also chose option e for drive size. This is a fairly useful size though you could certainly go large if you wished. As you see, the virtual drives are then created and the script ends.

There is a catch here. The drives created have bad headers. Next time we’ll cover how to repair the drives and your simulator will be ready to do some work.

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I’d like to get started with the Netapp’s simulator.  This is a very useful product that simulates a Netapp storage system.  I will be using it extensively in this blog so that even if you don’t have a Netapp storage system available you can still follow along.

What it is:

The simulator is a wonderful tool to learn about Netapp storage systems.  If you are currently supporting Network Appliance products and don’t have a lab or test system at work it is a great way to test concepts before implementation.  To understand the simulator you should realize that it is running real Data ONTAP code.  The Data ONTAP operating system is not simulated.  It is real.  What is being simulated is the underlying hardware and this brings with it some limitations.  The Network Appliance product that most closely resembles the simulated hardware is a FAS270.  Still, having your own “FAS270” to play with is pretty useful.

Limitations:

You will have to scale your test implementations down, but I have still found it to be very useful.  Like a FAS270, the simulator only supports two (simulated) Ethernet network ports and does not support fibre channel ports.  So you can’t use it to test ideas with fibre channel LUNs or run fibre channel diagnostic commands.   It does support iSCSI LUNs, though.  The number and size of simulated disks is limited, but is large enough to be useful. 

Performance will also not be indicative of real hardware.  We can test proof of concept scenarios, but not scalability or sizing.

Strengths:

The simulator supports clustering, so it is possible to build two simulators in a cluster configuration and test various failover scenarios.  Virtually all of the products Netapp has available for licensing are available with the simulator, so if you are interested in testing anything from LUN clones to SnapLock, it can be done with the simulator.  Simulator specific licenses are available for free. 

The simulator is available for free download from your NOW account.  You will either need to get a now account or talk to someone who has one to download the simulator. 

After logging in to NOW, go to the service and support page and look for Toolchest.  Select the toolchest and scroll down the page.  Items are in alphabetical order.  Look for “simulate ONTAP”.  It is currently item number 64, but this will probably change over time.

Environment: 

The simulator requires a Linux host.  Virtually any version of Linux will work with version 7+ of the simulator.  I have experienced Red Hat, SUSE and Ubunto without problems.  It is best to have two Ethernet ports on the Linux machine.  It also works fine in a VMware virtual machine, again configured with two virtual NICs.

Next:  setting up your simulator

 

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