Patent 7552044 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on June, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to simulating storage devices. In aspects, a test automation engine instructs a simulator to simulate a storage device having certain characteristics such as a storage area network. The test automation engine then tests an application against the simulated storage device. Tests may include storage management requests and storage access requests. A provider may translate a request to one or more operations suitable to perform the request on the underlying simulated device. Shadow copies and the results of other storage management-related operations may be shared across computers via aspects of a simulation framework described herein.