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2010.Q1 simulator

March 31, 2010

On the heels of the 2010.Q1 software release, we’ve provided a new version of the Sun Storage 7000 simulator that can be found at this new location. As noted previously, the simulator is a terrific way to take the Sun Storage 7000 user interface for a spin; it includes the exact same software as a physical 7000 series system with the same features.

The last release of the simulator added support for VirtualBox; this release now removes support for VMware. VMware was tremendously useful for our initial release, but VirtualBox has addressed the problems that initially excluded it, and the maintenance burden of supporting two virtual platforms has led us to drop VMware in this release. Future releases of the simulator will continue to be VirtualBox-only; our hope is that this doesn’t create a significant impediment as VirtualBox is free and readily available.

20 Responses

  1. I’m sure there was a higher-level business decision to this, but what level of support was offered with the simulator before?

  2. @eugene There is no support contract available for the simulator. That said, we are committed to correcting issues with the simulator — there’s no point in a free preview if there are problems with it. You can submit problems or comments via the feedback link at the bottom of the web interface.

  3. @stephen Probably a transient problem on our end. (I went through some of your recent postings over at tecosystems and, more, wickedclevah to find evidence of mental defect, but couldn’t; I forgot how much I agree with you on the industry and, more, the Red Sox… damn you.)

  4. I was actually hoping to see the simulator for VMWare ESXi. Not having to run a host O/S is actually very big advantage for a lab environment.

  5. @Sean Sorry to disappoint. We had to reign in the scope of platforms we support. We selected the approach we thought would let the most people try out the simulator. Were you hoping to use ESX just as an easy way to try it out for a little while or were you going to run the simulator out of ESX for an extended period?

  6. @tuxtof Agreed! Unfortunately, we ran into some technical problems and decided that it wasn’t worth investing the resources into both virtual platforms. Apologies if this represents a significant impediment.

  7. Not having a VMware release means at least for me that I will not use anymore the simulator, sadly since I liked it, my testing infrastructure is on VMware Workstation within teams and ESXi. It is not that I don’t like VBox, I like it indeed but I cannot add the simulator to my current lab environment which like I already said is in VMware.

  8. @Adam It would great to have the VMware version back. I finally downloaded the simulator and going to try it in my homelab where I have VBox along with VMware Workstation.
    As an additional though I believe that what you have to take into account is that many of us use this kind of virtual appliances/simulators in our work lab environments and to be sincere we don’t use VirtualBox there, in my particular case I have an ESXi where I like to run several storage virtual appliances to perform tests against my lab of HP-UX Integrity VMs (I’m an HP-UX Sysadmin). As I said VBox is a fine piece of software but in the enterprise VMware rules.

  9. I have to agree with the other comments above. I love VBOX and run it on my laptop. But where I test with the simulator I am running ESX.

  10. @Dale Had you successfully deployed the simulator on ESX? We developed it on the hosted products and customers reported varied success getting it to work on ESX.

  11. Like it or not, my test environment is ESX4i and XenServer 5.5.
    I run virtualbox on my laptop, but for me to provide this in a stable test environment for our IT group, it has to run on XenServer or VMware ESX.
    …oddly, I’ve never gotten any opensolaris stuff to work well on XenServer, which keeps it out of our datacenter altogether (we have pools of XenServer and VMware, and the XenServer pools are where the solaris candidate apps would run)

  12. @Lane Thanks for the feedback. Had you successfully run previous versions of the simulator under ESX? We had only tested it under the desktop products for Mac and Windows.

  13. @Adam
    I was unable to get the last (Q2?) version of the simulator to run under ESXi 4.
    I have also been unsuccessful (under Virtualbox 3.1.4 57640 on Ubuntu 9.10 x64) in every upgrade attempt of the simulator:
    2010Q1.0.0 –> 2010Q1.0.1
    2009Q2?–>2009Q3.0.0
    2009Q2?–>2009Q3.4
    2009Q2?–>2009Q3.5.1
    Half the time, the upgrade simply fails gracefully in the BUI/cli; the other times, it makes it far enough to reboot, but grub gives an error.

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