Quick update trying to get the NetApp Ontap Simulator to run in the Amazon EC2 Cloud.
What I have tried so far:
My first thought was to see if Amazon EC2 could import the OnTap simulator's OVA file and start and Bob's your uncle. Seemed reasonable to me at first. First off importing a OVA file in EC2 isn't a point and click operation, it requires some json magic which I'm not familiar with yet the instructions seemed pretty straight forward, well sort of 🙂 I created some groups, and started down the that rabbit hole until I started to realize that this effort wouldn't work because the sim, like Ontap on our arrays is running BSD under the covers. Pretty awesome, a huge fan of BSD myself, but Amazon's instances are from what I understand like docker instances and share a common Linux and Windows kernel. That being said, BSD just isn't an option and now it makes sense why.
I moved on to option 2, which was spin up a Windows 2012 server and install VMplayer on it then import the OVA file and next we are eating bowl of butter popcorn and a cholate shake from Alamo Drafthouse to celebrate... Well, that didn't work out after a few hours of work not to mention no celebration deserts and seeing The Arrival. Boo
Steps I took for option 2
- Spun up a Windows 2012 R2 instance with t2.large configuration to support the RAM requirements (success)
- Once logged in to my Windows instance, I downloaded and installed VMplayer (success)
- Imported the OnTap simulator OVA file and converted it using VMWare Player (success)
- Hit the play button to boot the simulator BSD instance of OnTap and VMware Player throws an error message: VMware Workstation and Hyper-V are not compatible. Remove the Hyper-V role from the system before running VMware Workstation (epic fail)
- Start to troubleshoot this issue and attempt to disable Hyper-V via the command line with administrator privs.
- bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
- reboot
- Still not working, same error message.
Theory: Perhaps VMware Player knows the 2012 instance I am running is virtual itself and won't allow virtual-->virtual-->virtual.
This is where I am at so far... Cheers