What you need for this book

If you were to follow along with each chapter by practicing the tasks in a lab, then you would need two ESXi hosts, two vCenter Servers, two SRM instances, and two storage array nodes with replication configured between them. This might sound like a lot of hardware, but all you need is VMware Workstation 9.x or 10.x and a Virtual Storage Appliance such as HP Store Virtual 9500 (LeftHand networks). You could get a trial license for HP Store Virtual by registering for one at HP's website. The ESXi hosts, vCenter Servers, vSphere Replication Appliances, SRM Servers, and the storage nodes would be virtual machines that are hosted using VMware Workstation.