I have the fortune of working for a large company and am able to use spare high end desktops for test servers, spare switches, cables, SCSI devices, etc. In my test environment, I have a private network with a Windows 2003 BEWS 10 server, two Windows server 2003 boxes, and one server2000 machine connected via ethernet switch. My test BEWS server is also on the corporate network so I can access the SAN, tape library, and B2D devices. I have an eval version on BEWS 10 so I can test all the features and decide which ones I will buy when it comes to upgrade time. (we run BEWS 9.1 in production now)
As far as restores go, this is our process: Rebuild the downed server from scratch, install the BE Remote agent, then run the full restore and any incremental restores up to the date of failure. I am testing the IDR option now, this is supposed to help automate this process. But so far has only been a headache.