Setting up the NetApp simulator on a CentOS server seemed, from all accounts, like it should be simple.
So, provisioned another Centos server using cobbler on a vSphere host. Installed the NetApp simulator, ran setup:
first minor hiccup was that if you try to give the simulator lots of memory (I tried about 3G) it silently reports a segmentation fault. (Silent from the runsim.sh script – run the called command manually and you can see it.)
Change that to 512M, and it works fine.
Second hiccup – I now had a working NetApp running on my Linux host, but it could not communicate with any other host. I could see it’s ARP requests reaching the default gateway, and the gateway replying, by the replies were not being seen on the Linux host hosting the simulator, nor on the simulator itself.
This tickled the memory that VMware locks down the virtual switch from promiscuous mode (and the simulator puts the host Linux into promiscuous mode, so it can receive packets for the virtual NetApp, which has its own mac and IP).
so:
fire up vCenter, click the Host, Configuration, Networking, properties, and set the VM Network switch to accept Promiscuous mode, Mac address changes, and Forged transmits.
Now my virtual NetApp is reachable, I can mount its volumes from other hosts in the lab, and all is well.
It responds to NetApp monitoring software just like a real NetApp, too, with API monitoring, etc.