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NetApp ONTAP 9.3 Simulator Deployment – Part 2


In Part 1 of the deployment guide, we learned how to deploy a single NetApp simulator on ESXi. For this post, I’d like to detail the process of adding a second simulator to the cluster. We did a lot of the legwork for the first node’s deployment, so adding the second node is a much shorter process.



1. Go through the steps to deploy the OVA package again just like the first simulator (refer to Part 1 steps 7-11 if needed)

2. Once the OVA has been deployed, boot the second simulator. This time, however, we’ll need to interrupt the boot process to access the LOADER prompt in order to change the system ID and serial number of the second simulator (two systems can’t have the same serial/system ID).

 Press Space Bar when you see the Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt. Booting in 10 seconds... message. You’ll see a VLOADER> prompt.

3. Run the setenv SYS_SERIAL_NUM 4034389-06-2 and setenv bootarg.nvram.sysid 4034389062 commands to set the serial number and system ID, respectively.






You can run the printenv SYS_SERIAL_NUM and printenv bootarg.nvram.sysid commands to verify that the values were updated accordingly.

4. Enter the boot command at the VLOADER prompt to boot the node.

5. When you see “Press Ctrl-C for Boot Menu”, press Ctrl-C.

6. At the Boot Menu, choose option 4.












7. Hit y when asked if you want to zero the disks, reset the config, and install a new filesystem. Hit y again to confirm. The node will reboot. As with the first node, this process will take several minutes.

8. Type yes to enable AutoSupport and hit Enter.










9. Hit Enter to accept e0c as the node management interface and fill in the IP/netmask details for the second node.









As with the first node, we'll be using the CLI to join the secondary node to the cluster.

 10. Type join when asked whether you want to create a new cluster or join an existing cluster.



11. Accept the system defaults at the next screen. The cluster interfaces will be created.







12. Hit Enter to join the existing cluster (in my environment, the cluster name is labcluster1).

 13. Assign all unowned disks to the second node by running the storage disk assign -all true -node <second node name> command.

 14. Assign the secondary node licenses from the text file that you used during the setup of the first node.

15. The setup of the second node is complete. Run a cluster show command to verify that the cluster is healthy.












That concludes the process for adding a second node to the NetApp Simulator environment! My simulators are running the GA version of 9.3 at the moment, but there have been some updates to 9.3 since its release - I'll cover upgrading the cluster to the latest 9.3 release in a future post.

 Thanks for reading!

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