There has been discussion lately around running SCOM 2012 and other SC products in the cloud for DEMO and POC purposes. One problem with running SCOM in a cloud solution is not having access to network device/s. There is a solution to this. You can run a network device emulator. This is available as software and will simulate a full network device that SCOM can then discover and monitor. You will find several network device emulation software packages out there with from a quick internet search. Here is a good tool that is free. It is called Xian SNMP Device Simulator and can be downloaded here:
http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/snmpsimulator
The devices it can simulate are:
- Cisco Switches
- Cisco Router
- Cisco Firewalls
- Cisco VPN Concentrators
- Cisco Wireless devices
- 3Com Switches
- HP Pro curve Switches
- F5 Big Ip Nortel
- APC UPS
You can simulate up to 15 devices with Xian SNMP Device Simulator . This same company has another tool that can be used as well that actually simulates network devices and traffic. This tool is called Xian NetFlow Simulator and can be downloaded here:
http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/xiannetflowsimulator
The Xian NetFlow Simulator is not free but you can obtain a trial. The Xian NetFlow Simulator sends packets between a given source and a destination. You could use SCOM to monitor actual network traffic using this second tool.
The first tool has been around for some time but I thought I would post about it again with talk of running SCOM in the cloud for demos. Here is a reference to an old blog post on setting up Xian SNMP Device Simulator and monitoring it with SCOM.
Test/Demo OpsMgr 2012 network monitoring with Jalasoft’s network device simulator
