Since last year I’m doing some more work on our NetApp infrastructure.
Since I don’t have any training in storage management and certainly not in NetApp devices, I was always afraid to do something because I couldn’t test it. I have some basic knowledge  and some experience in home storage solutions like Freenas and Openfiler that helped me allot to get the basics in Netapp.

Surfing the NetApp site I found out that they have a simulator … mmmm intresting

Do you want to build or test a solution but don’t have access to NetApp storage? The Data ONTAP simulator, a tool that gives you the experience of administering and using a NetApp storage system with all the features of Data ONTAP at your disposal, is the answer. Download the simulator; discuss usage; and share your experience, technical articles, and best practices here.

This seems perfect for me to get some more experience in the NetApp environment and trying out solutions before I implement them.

So I went on and tried it out. Here is how to set it up:

First of all download the ISO from the Netapp website

(I downloaded version 7.3.5 because that is the current version in production)

The link to the simulator download page (login required):
http://now.netapp.com/NOW/cgi-bin/simulator

Since I have a vmware test environement I will install the simulator on a virtual machine. Continue reading