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.
• Performance is a lot slower 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

If you come across another limitation please email the author with details so this list can be updated.