Simulator vs. Real

Performance will never be close, the simulators use a sequential journal, because OneFS is a journal'ed filesystem, and as a result, regardless of the disk under the hood reads and writes will be a good deal slower.  But functionally speaking?  They're pretty close.  The nice thing about the newer simulators is that you can activate your own evaluation licenses, and they never expire.  Downside of the simulators?  The amount of storage available to them.  It's tiny, I mean really tiny, like 18GB per node, so maybe you get 15-20GB usable with a 3 node cluster and default protection.  Of course file size matters a lot there.

We use them all the time for development / qc / and demonstrations.  BTW saw your other question this morning (which seems to have been removed) about migrating lots of windows file servers to Isilon, that's what our software does, and faster than anything else on the market.  Drop me a line if you'd like to have a chat about it separately.

~Chris Klosterman

Principal SE, Datadobi

chris.klosterman@datadobi.com

Thank you Chris for your prompt response.  So the simulator needs a license to function like the normal isilon?  is that license obtainable for free?

How do I get it then?  this is all for demo and POC.

Thank you for the thorough reponse. How do I trun on the advanced features to test them?  Do I need a license to load or somewhere in the admin panel and I just need to flip to on?

The simulator excluding the ability to do firmware updates and drivers is identical to the real item in regards to running a basic 4 node cluster our minimum config with OneFS 8.1.x.x and eLicensing. All CLI commands and GUI works the same. Being a virtual storage, performance will never equal the real thing. Each node has 40GB raw storage so expect this to be usable from 10GB on up depending on the protection level you use.

The simulator is fully functional once you bring the OVA file into VMware player, workstation, fusion or a vSphere setup. No license is required to run the basic simulator. Advanced features you can turn on yourself and the license never expires in the simulator.

Best part of using the simulator is that it is a great place to try out various policies, tiering, node pools, network configurations, etc. Once you have this figured out, you can then implement it in your physical production cluster.

You can download the simulator here: Isilon

onlinerack

On the 8.1.x .x OneFS Simulator, navigate to Cluster Management->Licensing and go to the bottom where "Manage Trials"  and click the button to activate the trial advanced features.

Isilon eLicensing