Tuesday 16 October 2007

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.

7 comments:

Dr. Watson said...

Hi Chris,

I came across your blog from a comment you posted on Barry Whyte's blog regarding pricing on the Zeus IOPS SSD. I was wondering if your info was MSRP or street pricing and if it was "official" or through the grapevine? Nice scoop, I've been looking for that pricing info for a while now to no avail.

Thanks.

Chris M Evans said...

Dr Watson

I can't remember where I found the information - I'll have a look again.

sd- said...

have you tried the ONTAP Simulator?

Chris M Evans said...

sd - oh yes I certainly have. I'm not a fan of Netapp as a company but what I do applaud them for is releasing the simulator and for the quality of the tool. It is excellent. If only all vendors would do something similar.

Tajinder Singh said...

Hi guys ,

i just happen to see this blog. Very good for Storage guys .M just learner in storage.Hope Chris can guide me whenever i need help.I have worked extensively on NetApp simulator.Its best sim product in the market build with original DataOntap code modfied for Simulation. It has 99.99 % functionality of the original NetApp filer.

-tajinder

Chad Sakac said...

Chris - FYI - there is a DART 5.6 simulator also, you can download it from my blog (so it's wide open public, not just people with Powerlink access).

It has 100% of the Celerra functions. It runs best under ESX, and needs a fair amount of RAM - but it is faster than the 5.5 sim you were using.

check it out at http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/get-yer-celerra.html

Chris M Evans said...

Chad,

Thanks for the link, I'll give it a go!