Installing Data ONTAP Simulator on ESXi 5.1.0

One of the best ways to get your feet wet with Data ONTAP is to get your hands on the Simulate ONTAP 8 software which allows you to install a "vsim", or virtual machine that runs Data ONTAP 8. It provides a great way to experiment with and learn about many of the features of Data ONTAP. The simulator can be downloaded from the NetApp support site NetApp customers and select partners. This guide assumes you already have the following:

1. You have already downloaded the vsim_esx-cm.tgz package (I'll be using Clustered ONTAP) from the support site.
2. Installed and configured your ESX host and can access it via SSH as well as through the vSphere client.

The following steps will have your simulator up and running Clustered ONTAP pretty quick. Let me know if you have questions, if I left something out, or if this guide helped you.

Step 1. The first thing we need to do is copy the vsim package to the datastore we'll be using. I used the vSphere client to accomplish this, though there are other ways. Click on your host in the left pane of vSphere Client> Select the configuration tab> and select storage in the Hardware pane on the left.Your screeen should look like this:

Right click the datastore you want to house the simulator and click "browse data store". Then click the icon with a green up arrow on top of a hard drive.

Select "upload file" and browse to the location you downloaded the simulator to and select it to begin the upload.

Step 2. Once the file has uploaded we need to untar it so we can use it. 

SSH to your ESX host and cd to the datastore we uploaded the vsim.tgz file to. In my case it looked like this:

~ # cd vmfs/volumes/storage

/vmfs/volumes/53a81f39-7f7d23f5-1240-001a64ca2d40 #

From here you will run the following tar command:

# tar xvf vsim_esx-cm.tgz

It should look something like this at first:

/vmfs/volumes/53a81f39-7f7d23f5-1240-001a64ca2d40 # tar xvf vsim_esx-cm.tgz

vsim_esx-cm/

vsim_esx-cm/cfcard/

vsim_esx-cm/cfcard/env/

vsim_esx-cm/cfcard/env/env

vsim_esx-cm/nvram

vsim_esx-cm/DataONTAP.vmdk

vsim_esx-cm/DataONTAP-flat.vmdk

It will take sometime for the vmdk files to unpack. This is a good time to go grab a beer ;)

Step 3. Once complete you can refresh the datastore browser and see the unpacked folder. I usually rename it to something more meaningful, then drill down and rename the vmx file to something meaningful as well, but this is optional.

Now its showtime! Let's fire up our simulator and lay down some basic configuration of the cluster. 

Step 4. Within the "browse datastore" window drill down to the vsim's vmx file, right click it, and select "add to inventory"

Name the vsim and click "next"

Select a resource pool. and click "next" For me this is simple as I'm only using one host in my lab and therefore only have one resource pool. 

On the "ready to complete" screen click "finish"

Close the datastore browser window.

You should now see a new, powered off ONTAP simulator vm in your inventory in the left pane of vSphere.

Right-click the new vm, mouse-over "power" then click "power-on".

At this point if all goes well, your ONTAP simulator vm should power on. In which case you can skip this next section. My vm however, would not power on. I received the following error:

Lucky for me I have run into this before the last time I rebuilt my lab. ESXi 5.1 no longer loads the vmkernel multiextent module by default. To load it I ran the following command on the ESX host via SSH:

vmkload_mod multiextent

You should see something like this:

~ # vmkload_mod multiextent

Module multiextent loaded successfully

And now you can can power on the vm.

Step 5. To apply some basic configuration, right-click the vm and select "open console"

We want to interrupt the boot process by hitting "ctrl+c" when prompted for the boot menu.

At the boot menu, type "4" and enter.

You will likely see some console spam and within it the system will ask "Zero disks, reset config and install a new file system?"

Hit "y" and enter

It will ask you again, "Zero disks, reset config and install a new file system?:"

Hit "y" and enter

The simulator will reboot to wipe config/disks.

When it reboots youll see some more console spam and the first time I did this (long ago) I thought the simulator was panicking and dumping core. It's not, its just wiping the disks.

Let it do it's thing. When it boots, it will automatically fire off the cluster setup script. You'll want to type "create" and hit enter.

We're standing up a single node cluster in this post. I may do another one with multiple nodes later, but there's some limitations with the simulator when it comes to HA, so for now, we'll just use a single node.

Type "yes" and hit enter

There will be a delay after you hit enter. But just let it work.

You will then be asked to name your cluster. Type a name and hit enter

You'll then be asked to enter the base license key. Type the key in and hit enter.

You'll then have an opportunity to add additional license keys. Lets skip this for now and get SSH working so we don't have to use the console and can cut/paste the other license keys.

You'll be prompted to set and confirm the admin password. 

Now configure the management interface. This interface would be used to manage the entire cluster in a multi-node cluster. As soon as the management interface is configured, you can use SSH to connect to the cluster and complete configuration.

SSH to your management interface that you configured above. Log in as admin and the password you set earlier. If you managed to lose/forget the password, go back to step 5.

Once you're logged in via SSH, just re-run the cluster setup script and hitting enter to keep the same settings you already applied, until you get to adding licenses, DNS setup, etc. After completing the setup script, your cluster is ready to serve some data. I'll have another post up soon about actually doing some evaluation of the many features of Data ONTAP.