Using Vagrant to provision the Clustered Data ONTAP vSim
- 2 minsThis post was previously hosted on a different site and then migrated here.
This post initially started out as a guide to deploying and setting up the cDOT simulator, but over the weekend I stumbled across a collection of scripts on GitHub that allowed you to use Vagrant to provision and configure the simulator.
For those that don’t know what Vagrant is - you’re missing out. If you’re like me and you like to play with new technologies, Vagrant allows for easy creation, configuration, and destruction of test boxes and environments.
Eric Wright has done a good series on getting started with Vagrant, so if you’re interested in taking a look at it I recommend starting there, and with the official documentation.
A few things you need to get started:
Installation is pretty straight forwards:
- First off go to the repo and clone it to your workstation like so (note - I am using a forked repository in this instance, as I’ve been making changes to the scripts):
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Download the SDK and Simulator OVA to the project root directory, ensure that the correct versions of each product are used - 8.3 for the sim, and 5.4 for the SDK - otherwise the scripts will fail to run at this point.
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Edit vsim.conf to set the cluster base license, and any further licenses you wish to configure.
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At this point we’re ready to fire up our simulator, from the root of the project run
$ vagrant up -
This will do a bunch of stuff (including asking you if you want to import the simulator on first run), spinning up a servicevm for the SDK and to run the provisioning, spinning up the vsim box, and setting up a 1 node cluster, and should start something like this:
- When the build is complete you should see something similar to this, confirming that the cluster is available and online, management lifs have been setup, and that ssh is available:
- Now you’ll be able to ssh to your simulator by running
vagrant ssh vsim, and when you’ve finished testing whatever it is you want to test destroy the environment by just runningvagrant destroy. Easy.
I’ve forked the original repo and shall be updating it soon to support the latest version of the simulator and try and keep it in-line with releases, but props go to the chap that pulled this together originally. Nice work.
Ed Morgan
GTM Technical Lead @ Rubrik, I like the Cloud, automation, and picking heavy things up then putting them down again.