I use the simulator to demonstrate SMSQL, SME, SMO, Snapdrive, SMVI, VSC, and many other of the advanced tools on the simulator. I see two main issues with the current simulator.
1: Lack of disk space, caused by the small disks
2: Lack of performance, caused by the 2MB NVRAM.
i understand the need to keep people from using it as a production device but with these two limitations it sometimes causes demonstrations to go negative. i don't know how many times i've heard comments about the speed of the simulator while demonstrating the ability of SME or SMSQL to migrate databases from local storage to SAN storage. For the most part you can joke about it and laught it off, but the negative feeling is there. So what are the possible fixes.
For Item number 1 you could increase the size of each disk to 5 or 10G/disk. At the most, even with the sim hack, it would give someone 560GB of raw space. in todays day and age no one is going to use that for production. its barely big enough to hold a decent MP3 collection, but it would let us demonstrate more advanced features and add more virtual machines into the environment, for example when demonstrating a virtualized SMMOSS server farm. Think about the dog and pony show you could give. virtualized vcenter, virtualized vsphere servers, virtualized sql servers, virtualized simulator. I could do a complete demo from my laptop for a customer on how to set up a virtual SMMOSS/SMVI/VSC environment. thats some power. Can't do it now because i can't really set up a good SMMOSS farm in VM, in an NFS datastore, running on the simulator. not enough room.
For Item number 2 you could increase the NVRAM. the 8.0 simulator is 32MB now and the performance is MUCH better than the 7.3 simulator. I believe 64 to 128MB would be very nice in the simulator (just a guess as i have nothing to base this on). it still wouldn't be so fast as to endanger the physical storage system market, but it would be AWESOME for demo's. Imagine demonstrating the things mentioned in the item 1 example with this new performance boost. customers would love it. Students would love it. and nerds like me would love it. but in the end it wouldn't be anywhere as fast as the cheapest NAS box i could buy, nor as fast any i could build using popular (unmentionable) software thats available.
lets recap this, with a modest increase in disk size we gain the ability to do more complex customer demos with higher end NetApp software solutions. Because its only a modest increase, the unapproved usage risk is negligible but the potential market penetration is fantastic. With a modest increase in NVRAM you can double or triple the current performance, allowing more complex demonstrations, allowing customers to see more of that incredible software, again with negligible risk to unapproved usage. From my, limited, perspective all i can see is upside.