Hello @TonyWall,
I have nothing to offer with regard to the OP's question ("do I use Hyper-V or VMware?") as I've found them to be mostly equivalent from a hypervisor standpoint for some time now...it typically comes down to which skill set you're most comfortable with.
That being said, I'll add comments to some of your statements around the ONTAP Simulator...
NetApp Simulate VM image is built with VMware exclusive features
The simulator is distributed, and documented, as VMware images suitable for running using either VMware Workstation (nee Player, though the "Professional" version will also work of course) or the data center products (i.e. ESXi). That being said, it does work using other *desktop* virtualization tools. For example, it is possible to use Oracle's VirtualBox to execute the Simulator (regardless of the underlying OS). I have not tried, so can not attest to whether it works, to use Hyper-V or KVM for the Simulator.
There are no longer options to use the NetApp Simulator in Hyper-V, Windows or Linux
I was not aware it was ever an option to use the Simulator with one of those tools.
Even the NetApp in CentOS in Hyper-V workaround also locked-out.
I think you're referring to the old ONTAP 7.x simulator? It ran in a Linux host (physical or virtual) as a process. The simulator for ONTAP 8 and 9 is a virtual machine because it runs a BSD version for the OS.
We use Hyper-V in our development environment and are happy with it, but must have some VMware ESXi boxes around just for NetApp, very annoying! At least we should be able to run it on a Linux machine, then it could be housed in any Hypervisor for testing/development purposes.
ONTAP Select can run using KVM as the hypervisor, however I don't believe it works with Hyper-V. You may be able to work with your account team to try Select to see if it will work for your purposes.
Actually with current technology you should skip a whole generation and publish some kind of open container image like Docker?
ONTAP is BSD based...containers are based on Linux's namespace technology (yes, I know there are Windows containers...I don't know the details there however). Unfortunately, this means ONTAP is incapable of being containerized.
Hope that helps, please let me know if I can help answer any questions.
Andrew
If this post resolved your issue, please help others by selecting ACCEPT AS SOLUTION or adding a KUDO.