Introduction
SimSANs, Simulating Storage Area Networks, is a Data
Center Storage Networking design and simulation tool. It is
especially useful in infrastructure design and performance analysis of
modern Fibre Channel
(and FCoE) based data center storage networks.
This software tool includes three components:
- Backend Simulation Engine: the simulation core, designed in C++ and based on top of OMNeT++ discrete event simulation framework.
- Backend Management Agent: the management core, designed in C# and used to control and operate the simulation engines by accepting the requests from management console.
- Frontend Management Console: the GUI, designed in C# and used as a sole management interface for users to remotely control and operate multiple backend simulation engines, including configure, launch, and monitor simulations.
Each simulation Engine is an independent SimSANs simulation instance, which is located in a dedicated directory in the backend host and can be managed separately by the remote Console GUI. A single management agent needs to launch in order to simultaneously communicate with multiple simulation engines running in the same host. Console GUIs can be launched in a frontend management host to communicate with agents and be able to manage simulation engines. The following picture shows the communication framework among the three components:
A brief introduction of major concepts can be found in Architecture. How to install and run SimSANs v3 is detailed in User Guide, where user may pay more attention to the Console GUI usage, particularly how to configure and monitor SAN related stuff such like: FC Fabric, FC Ports, SNS, Zone, Initiator, Target, Client Host Assignments, LUN Assignments, and IO Performance, etc. The following two pictures shows how the Console Main Window (left) and Configuration Window (right) look like:
Please regularly check Updates for upcoming announcements of features and bug fixes. If you are interested in the earlier versions (v1 and v2), you may want to visit the History behind the SimSANs.
Keywords: SimSANs, SimSAN, SimSANs v3, SimSAN v3, SAN Simulation, Simulating SAN, Storage Area Network, FC SAN, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel Protocol, FCoE, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, OMNeT, OMNeT++, SCSI, Fibre Channel Simulator, FC Simulator, FCoE Simulator, SAN Simulator.
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