Please support the ontap simulator in kvm virtualization and not just vmware

[RedHat]

I know this has been brought up before but I'm asking NetApp to please consider adding KVM virtualization for their ontap simulator.  Please put this on your roadmap, if not officially in some unofficial community supported manner.

Thanks.

 **edited out by moderator**

[D_BEREZENKO]

Hi Dave.

I know You are asking about tech support, but you can try ONTAP Select. There is no ONTAP simulator image for RedHat KVM, but there is ONTAP Select which is officially supported on RedHat Linux with KVM. ONTAP Select can run on a built-in trial license for 90 days, and then you need to reinstall ONTAP Select.

Since ONTAP Simulator & ONTAP Select sharing big about of the same source code, you should convert virtual machine with the simulator and try to run it in KVM; maybe it is gonna work.

Hey, @netapp what you will tell us on this one?

[SeanHatfield]

It's been a while since I last attempted it, but from what I recall I got the sim to boot, but it didn't have any working network adapters.  I got to about the same point on hyper-v.  It does work in VirtualBox though, so thats an alternative.  Select on KVM does work fine.  A few difference of note are:

In Select, commands that don't work (like FC commands) are disabled.  In vSim you can use them, they just don't do anything.

In Select, you can't simulate aggrs of different disk types.  It's either all vmdisk or ssd depending on how you deploy it.

In Select, your lab implodes every 90 days.

Select also needs significantly more resources than vSim.  vSim runs fine of ~5gb ram and 2 vCPU cores.  Select needs minimum 16gb and 4 cores, and goes up from there if you want to put it on SSD, plus some additional resources for the deploy VM.

But if you can swing the additional resources and don't mind the periodic total rebuild, its a good alternative.  

[bwells · Accepted solution]

I was able to get the 9.5 simulator working in QEMU/KVM.  I used virt-manager and GNS3 to manage it.  

1. Convert vmdk's to qcow2 format using qemu-img

2. Move qcow2 files to a location where virt-manager can find them or browse to

3. Create your vm in virt-manager and select import disk option

4. Add disk one 

5 Set memory to no less than 5 gb of ram and cpu to no less than 2

6. Name it and select customize

7. Add remaining qcow2 disks and make sure they are all ide

8. Add 3 more NICs that are e1000 

9. Make sure you change from Spice to VNC

10. Boot VM

11. When "CTRL-C for boot menu", hit CTRL-C

12. In boot menu select option 4 (disk have been setup for vmware and we need to zero those out)
13. Follow all netapp procedures from there

This worked fine for me using both in virt-manager and GNS3 using Ontap 9.5. 

[aborzenkov]

Could you attach full VM definition for reference? Such instructions tend to become outdated as software changes, having actual working definition can always be applied even if defaults change.

[ilya_v]

Hi,

This thread seems to be the most recently updated on that topic.

Confirming bwells response, Workstation OVA runs fine inside QEMU/KVM.

The described steps are pretty comprehensive, but I thought I should add my xml for the simulator, as someone may still be interested in detailed VM description.

[Darkstar]

---

@bwells wrote:

I was able to get the 9.5 simulator working in QEMU/KVM.  I used virt-manager and GNS3 to manage it.  

1. Convert vmdk's to qcow2 format using qemu-img

2. Move qcow2 files to a location where virt-manager can find them or browse to

3. Create your vm in virt-manager and select import disk option

4. Add disk one 

5 Set memory to no less than 5 gb of ram and cpu to no less than 2

6. Name it and select customize

7. Add remaining qcow2 disks and make sure they are all ide

8. Add 3 more NICs that are e1000 

9. Make sure you change from Spice to VNC

10. Boot VM

11. When "CTRL-C for boot menu", hit CTRL-C

12. In boot menu select option 4 (disk have been setup for vmware and we need to zero those out)
13. Follow all netapp procedures from there

This worked fine for me using both in virt-manager and GNS3 using Ontap 9.5. 

---

This works, but from my experience it is very brittle: If the VM crashes for any reason (i.e. any improper shutdown), it will not come back up and panic, with lots of errors in the md-devices and being unable to mount its root directory.

This also happens for VMware and makes it very hard to actually use the simulator (i.e. you cannot show how the system recovers from an unexpected failure, because, well, it usually won't recover at all 😉 )

I think this works better with ONTAP select, but setting that up without the deploy VM is very undocumented

Does anyone have a solution for that problem?

[RedHat]

Hi

I've started ontap simulator 9.7 successfully on Fedora-33, and recorded steps here:

https -> tcler.github.io/2020/07/27/netapp-ontap-simulator-on-libvirt-kvm.md

Thanks @bwells and all.

[RedHat]

Update:

Now we have automated the following steps:

   1) start VM(VMs) in KVM

   2) initialize system as single-node or dual-node cluster

   3) add extra disk shelf for each node -> increase total aggr space from 18G+ to 189G+

share the code here:

   https://github.com/tcler/ontap-simulator-in-kvm

Jianhong Yin

[SeanHatfield]

I like it, there's clever stuff there.  

The approach I take is I mount the cf disk image, set all the bootargs, unmount the disk image, and then turn it on and let it spin up.  Expect style scripting tended to be unreliable as the prompts changed over time.

[Darkstar]

Hi Sean,

what bootargs do you set in the env file? Is there a list somewhere on how to configure, say, 2-node clusters with IP addresses and all?

Maybe you could share your script? 

thanks

-Michael