I was an instructor at SNW this year at the JW Marriott hotel in Orlando, Florida. Along with fellow Oracle co-worker Ray Clarke, we represented the ZFS Storage Appliance in a hands-on environment that allowed storage administrators and industry experts to demo our product in a simulated environment.

Rather than haul physical equipment to the convention, we setup an array of Windows 7 virtual machine sessions paired with a ZFS simulator running on Virtual Box across two remote X4270 machines. This let us create a classroom environment of 24 stations (48 VM sessions) that created a superb replica of the 7000 product that each user could toy around with as they completed the storage exercises we devised.

If you missed the opportunity to demo our product, or would like to download and play with the simulator in your own environment, feel free to check out the following links to get started.

• Download Simulator
• Download Virtual Box (required)