Lab Series 01: Part 1 – NetApp in VMware Workstation Initial Design

Introduction

Started a couple of weeks back, here are some details of my pet project to set up a VMware Workstation learning lab containing both 7-Mode and Cluster Mode Data ONTAP 8.1.2 Simulators, Edge VSA, and more! It’s a work in progress and how far we get will depend on time. The rudimentary Visio diagram below shows the initial design with 2 x SIM 8.1.2 C-Mode clusters (one local and one multi-site – the simulator licenses only allow two nodes in a cluster, hence the two clusters), 2 x SIM 8.1.2 7-Mode appliances (one in Site 1, the other Site 2), and two Edge 8.1.1 appliances. Note: The Data ONTAP Edge 8.1.1 appliances run Data ONTAP 8.1.1 7-Mode and need to run on VMware ESXi!

Image: Diagram of initial lab design

VMware Workstation Networking

Here we keep the networking configuration very simple, each and every virtual device network adapter in this lab will be connected to the NAT network.

Image: Virtual Network Editor

To allow communication between different subnets and sites, we have two Windows Server 2003 servers (not domain joined) running Routing and Remote Access (which is installed by default in 2003), with RRA enabled and configured as a simple Router for Local area network (LAN) routing only. ROUTER101 exists in Site 1, ROUTER201 in Site 2.

Image: Routing and Remote Access – enabled as router for LAN routing

VMware Workstation 9 allows up to 10 virtual network adapters per virtual machine, and – for the Server 2003 routers – we’ve given each router the full allocation of 10. Later in this post, all necessary routes for intra-site and host PC to VM communication are detailed, along with preliminary IP addressing and network ranges (these may well change in the process of setting up this lab.)

Image: A Router’s Virtual Machine Settings with 10 NICs

Subnets, IP Address and Routes

Table: Site 1 and Site 2, network subnets

Table: Other networks

Table: Host Workstation IP Addresses

The following routes are required on the host PC, for it to communicate with everything:

route add 10.1.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.0.0.3 -p

route add 10.2.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.0.0.4 -p

Table: Router IP Address for Site 1 and Site 2 routers

The following routes are required on the routers for site to site communication for all subnets (the first line is for ROUTER101 and the second line for ROUTER201):

route add 10.2.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.0.12.2 -p

route add 10.1.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 10.0.12.1 -p

Table: Device IP Addresses

Summary

This completes the design post. This is quite a full-on design, and definitely over-the-top on detail for all but the most hard-core home lab enthusiasts. The design here serves purely to give ideas and it is free to use. Time permitting – for future posts we hope to publish more content based around this lab design.

Happy lab-ing!