New Celerra Simulator

Thanks to all those who drew my attention to the new version of the Celerra Simulator. EMC have done the right thing and made this version freely downloadable to anyone with a Powerlink account. This is a good thing as it gives everyone a chance to have a go. Just go into Powerlink and search on Celerra Simulator; the new version is 5.5.29.1.

There have been a few changes made with this version. Firstly there aren't the unwieldly restrictions on the ACE (I think that was the Assured Computing Environment) which meant installing only on an Intel platform and having no other version of VMware installed on the target machine. This was a real pain as I use AMD a lot and I had to install on a machine that was less than desirable. EMC also time expired the previous versions which required a patch to extend the expiration date. Fortunately the latest version has no such restriction.

So I've installed the simulator under VMware on my test machine. After a few niggles with the network settings I managed to get onto the web-based administration tool. So far I've found the simulator slow. That could well be my test machine or the way I've configured the VMware guest the simulator runs in. I need to do some experimenting to get that right.

If you're not familiar (like me) with Celerra, using the simulator can be good and bad; good because you can familiarise yourself with the terminology the product uses; bad because there's a new learning curve to get anything working. In particular to see whether the simulator can actually store any data (which the Netapp simulator can).

Download and have a go - I'd be interested in everyone's feedback.