So I have to admit that I hate GUI interfaces to appliances and I love simulators. At NetApp, I loved the really streamlined console you had for a filer and hated FilerView. I would roll my own Perl scripts to maintain a large pool of filers when I was a filer admin for both Corporate and Engineering IT over there.

And when I worked for NetApp's NFS team, I loved the sims we used for quick and painless testing.

So I approached the Sun Unified Storage Simulator with a bit of trepidation. It turns out that you can ssh into the box, but doing remote administration that way is no where near as nice as the NetApp filer console was three years ago. (Note: I have no experience with the GX series console.) Update: I've quantified my views on the ssh access over at So what didn't I like about the CLI?.

The better news is that the remote http access is way better than FilerView. I was able to quickly understand the relationship between projects and shares. I was able to quickly configure a complicated share on my storage. I loved it.

I also loved that it worked straight away, right out of the box. I happened to already have VMware Workstation 6.5.1 on my home desktop, so I was up and running. I was a little disappointed that it only supported local access on the desktop, until I realized I had 3 other network interfaces I could configure. Before I knew it, I had mounts going to it from remote computers.

I really found the GUI to be intuitive and I only struggled for a bit wishing for a CLI. I also used the minimal CLI to gather some data on the share. It reminded me a lot of the way our LOM managers work.

The other real plus in comparing this simulator versus the ones NetApp provides is that I don't need any license keys. Sweet!