Upgrade Ontap 9.5P6 simulator on ESXi - best method?

[MigEngineer]

I have a couple of 9.5P6 VMs running on various versions of ESXi.

Recently, I fired one up to do some development, and ran into the "FPolicy servers fail to authenticate due to CVE-2022-38023" problem (as detailed here: https://kb.netapp.com/onprem/ontap/da/NAS/FPolicy_servers_fail_to_authenticate_due_to_CVE-2022-38023 ) which meant I couldn't access its CIFS shares.

The problem doesn't exist for later versions on ONTAP, but as far as I'm aware, 9.5P6 is the "last" version that is officially supported for ESXi (and I've tried downloading the 9.13 simulator OVA and deploying that on ESXi, but it fails)

I've read that it's possible to upgrade a working instance of 9.5P6 on ESXi to later versions, but when I attempt to download an upgrade image (eg, from here: https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/products/all/details/ontap9/downloads-tab/download/62286/9.7P23) I get an "unauthorised access" page.

Can anyone give me some advice on what they think the best way forward is? I suppose I could deploy a later simulator on VM Workstation on a Windows ESXi VM, but my experience of running other OS this way is that they are painfully slow.

[John_Kolacz · Accepted solution]

Neil Anderson at Flackbox has a great tutorial to set up an entire environment, from network, mgmt, and cluster switches, to a 2 node cluster, a single node cluster, linux and win clients, and a virtual esx environment.  All you need is vmware player although you could probably set it up using virtualbox or if you've got a license you can use esx desktop.

I've got it built on my laptop which has 16GB ram and an i7-1185G7 cpu running windows 11.  The whole environment runs great on my system even when everything is up and running. I'm using vmware player.

His classes and all his NetApp stuff are here:

• Premium NetApp ONTAP Storage Complete course
  https://www.flackbox.com/netapp-course#jk4
• Free NetApp Lab Guide
  https://www.flackbox.com/netapp-simulator#jk4
• Free Intro to SAN and NAS Storage course
  https://www.flackbox.com/introduction-to-san-and-nas-storage#jk4
• Free Intro to Cloud Computing course
  https://www.flackbox.com/intro-to-cloud-computing#jk4
• Flackbox Homepage
  https://www.flackbox.com#jk4

[MigEngineer]

Thanks for the reply.

Can other machines on your network access the ONTAP shares and cluster management interface OK?

In an ideal world I'd have the vSim running directly on ESXi rather than on a Windows VMPlayer, but if that's the only option....

[John_Kolacz]

It works great on esxi also. That actually makes your setup of the lab easier as you don't need the virtual vcenter and esxi hosts.
I'm trying to think of a reason why the network setup would be more complicated but off the top of my head I think it should work fine.

If you look over the lab setup you'll see how it works- Neil Anderson put a ton of work into building a lab environment that does everything you would want in order to simulate a storage environment.

Also I forgot to mention it in my original reply, but those are affiliate links, so if you follow those links and purchase anything I will receive a small commission.

John Kolacz
Lead Systems Architect

Martin Marietta
4123 Parklake Avenue Raleigh, NC 27612

cell (919) 909-8348

[cid:image001.png@01D9EBA3.5DFCB760]

[MigEngineer]

Thanks, but this doesn't really answer my question about upgrading an existing installation, or getting around the problem that versions later than 9.5P6 are not officially supported under ESXi.