What are the known limitations of the simulator?

Although the simulator attempts to be as close to a real system as possible it has several limitations.

• No FCP SAN support. This requires real hardware that cannot be emulated in software.
• Only 2 network ports. Real Filers and NearStore (except the FAS2xx range) have more network ports available.
• The network port names are called ns0 and ns1 - not e0 and other names that normal hardware calls the network port names.
• Performance is muchslower than real hardware.
• The simulator doesn't accurately reflect the platform limits of a NearStore nor a Filer. For example, the maximum raid group size on a NearStore is 8 (or so, depends on the version of ONTAP) but the simulator has a limit of 28. Also the number of vfilers is 5 instead of whatever larger number the real platform supports.
• Limited disk support. The maximum size of a simulator is around 28GB.
• Environment variables (such as setenv vfiler-ips? true) cannot be set. This means that the documented processes for things like vfiler failback won't work as-is with the simulator.
• VMware does not support VIFs with simulators version 6.2 upwards due to changes to the way the mac address is created.
• Microsoft Virtual PC does not allow simulators to see the outside network so use with Virtual PC is of limited value.
• The date command will not set the date or time in the simulator - nor will FilerView or any other management tool be able to do this. The date and time are taken directly from the Linux host so please ensure the date and time are correct there. Please see the Date and Time FAQ entry.
• Some commands may not work exactly as they do on normal hardware. This is a partial list since commands can and do change between versions of Data ONTAP. For example:
  • version -b [this is to show the boot image on compact flash machines. The -b option doesn't exist on simulators]
  • disk assign [to assign disks to filer head units in a cluster. Simulators prior to 7.2 with script version 19 or below don't support this option although ONTAP does]
  • disk remove_ownership [see disk assign above]
  • disk show [see disk assign above]
• If you come across another limitation please email the author with details so this list can be updated.