Imperva Cyber Community

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  • 1.  Imperva DAM lab

    Posted 07-27-2021 06:59

    Hello, 

    I am thinking to create Imperva DAM lab environment where I can explore the full functionality in the product in safe environment, and just wondering what is the best way and cost effective way to do it. 

    Also from technical perspective:
    How many machines do I need?
    Is there a difference if it is on-prem or in AWS/Azure?
    What licences do I need?

    I will greatly appreciate any comments on that or if can share some kb articles/videos/presentations etc?

    Thank you.


    #DatabaseActivityMonitoring

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    Iliya Todorov
    Engineer
    London
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  • 2.  RE: Imperva DAM lab

    Posted 07-27-2021 09:38
    Check with your sales engineer or account manager to determine if your existing license will allow you to build a lab.

    The types of licenses keep changing so I can only speak about the Flex license that I previously had.
    This was at a large company and gave us the ability to build all the appliances that we would need.
    The lab I built had VMs for SOM, MX, and three clustered gateways.  We also had a couple of old physical appliances, a Onebox and a gateway.

    Depending on what you want to do with your lab you could use a minimum of an MX and a gateway.

    I have not worked with Cloud appliances, but I would try to build the lab in the type of infrastructure as what the production appliances would be built in.


  • 3.  RE: Imperva DAM lab

    Posted 07-28-2021 10:53
    We have labs that we use for demos.  For mine I just have an MX, a single gateway and a Sonar machine.  Depending on what you are testing, you may need to add another gateway for clustering or drop the Sonar machine.  You might also need some database servers to monitor, although there is a process where you can drop pcaps on the gateway machine to simulate traffic if you need to keep it tight.  Or just shut down the database server after you have captured what you want.

    For a lot of things like configuring policies etc. you don't even need to keep the gateway running.  I often give a GUI walkthrough with only the MX machine turned on.

    I have a v13 MX running in VMware Workstation with 4 cores and 8GB ram.  My gateway runs with 2 cores and 4GB RAM.  (I think the initial install looks for more RAM, but you can dial it down afterward).  You can go below the minimum requirements as long as you are just using it for demo / testing.  If you reach out to support with a problem on that system they may ask you to increase.  For an AWS system, you can pick the size of machine you want for your MX but the gateway size for DAM is fixed.  You might be able to edit the CFT to change it, but that might not work.  At worst you can keep the gateway shut off most of the time to save costs.

    Per Robert, any FlexProtect/Data Protect/Data Secure license lets you deploy whatever infrastructure you need to monitor the number of servers you are licensed for and that includes any testing MX and gateways you want to set up (as long as they aren't monitoring an active database).

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    Jim Burtoft (Prm)
    SE
    State College PA
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