SAN Simulators

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Guys anyone know of any simulators for SAN solutions from EMC or HP to learn on. I heard that EMC have a free EMC simulator but you needed to sign up for an EMC account on their website and it was down at the time.

 

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Who needs a sim

have a read over this blog and this post

 

I was going to suggest the Uber VSA, glad you got it another way

 

Must admit it’s a sweet little appliance, I’ve got my lab setup like Nicks SRM + VSA video which I’ve never tried before, its cool how that all works

 

Cheers for the pointers guys. Trying to find out what Celerra UBER VSA is from the website links and am still confused as to what it is and does. Am I right in thinking it's a GUI to interface with a SAN.

What I'm after and don't know if it exists is a sort of sim that allows you to input commands and setup pretend LUN's and so on so you get used to working on a SAN without actually having to mess around with a real SAN. Reason I ask is that I worked for a company and one of the SAN guys wiped an entire SAN by mistake so I thought ahh that doesn't sound too good so thought if there was such a think as SAN simulator software like Cisco have for there equipment.

 

Its a Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance

More info over at Chads blog

 

Chad is definitely someone you want to listen to, he is to EMC Storage what Vaughn Stewart is to NetApp, both of these guys are great Storage bloggers and worth reading up on as they are both leaders in the storage arena (with EMC and NetApp).

 

There's a NetApp sim available as well if you're that way inclined - it's 'official' and you don't need a support contract to get it, but bloody difficult to find. If you want, PM me and I'll upload it to my dropbox. You'll need a linux distro to run it - pretty much any one will do, if you need instructions for installing on a specific flavour I can probably dig some out from somewhere.

I found it useful when i was learning OnTap - especially since I got chucked in at the dep end (no-one else had any knowledge, bloke who set up our NetApps left before me leaving no documentation, we had no active support contract and no test SANs to muck about with - eek!)

 

Zeb, Cheers mate for the pointer. Going to download off their website and have a play around with it.

 

Wow - you can download it direct from the website now? That makes a change - usually you need a NOW account to get anything of value out of NetApp!

 

I've signed up for a guest account I take it that isn't a NOW account

 

LOL - nope. Welcome to the nightmare that is NetApp - where an 8" SFP cable costs 300 quid, disks are about a grand each and 'maintenance renewal' costs 20 grand a year. The hideous overpricing of everything is why we moved completely off them and onto Equallogic - a brand new SAN cost us less than renewing maint on our NetApp of the same class.

The guest login won't give you access to anything - but the simulator was made freely available by them a while ago. You could try asking nicely in the NetApp mailing list (Toasters) or, failing that, I could try and dig out the last version I got. Let me know if you get hold of it yourself.

 

Cheers mate, much appreciated.

 

As Triple-T would say:

"You got MAIL baby"

 

Zeb, cheers mate, much appreciated. Got the files and going to attempt to set it up over the weekend

 

Cool - no worries. First couple of times you try and set it up you'll get errors (not familiar with how well you know your way around linux, so that might be a learnign curve for you as well!). You may also have problems zeroing out or initialising disks - If you do, I can probably help at that point if I dig out my notes

Good luck!

 

You could also have a look at HP Lefthand VSA when your done with NetApp and EMC

 

Cheers Thomas for the reply. Had a look at this before and it's not what I'm after but cheers anyways mate. Personally I can't understand why HP and EMC which are 2 of the biggest SAN manufactures don't have simulators or emulators for their most popular SAN solutions. SAN's aren't something you can just have a play around with in a production environment so it would make sense for them to have software that mimics a SAN that you can practice creating and say resizing LUN's etc without the worry of breaking it.

 

Maybe I'm picking you up wrong here but thats what they are doing.

Celarra VSA is a Virtual Celerra SAN



and the LeftHand P4000

 

EMC do have a Celerra simulator. I've used it before - but never got past the initial setup and fiddling stages as EMC were way out of my budget when I looked at replacing the NetApps I have