I’ve been selected to build a Hands on Lab for the 2014 release of labs and am going to write a few posts to describe the process and my experience!
VMware’s Hand on Labs are a brilliant resource for everyone to use. You can try just about every VMware product in a fully working environment available 24×7, on demand and free.
The folks who put the labs together work hard on creating scenarios to help guide you through the use of a particular product or solution. Within the lab environment you are free to follow the scenarios or you can go ‘off piste’ and poke around the products, typically with full administrative access.
Creating a lab, is therefore quite an involved process – as a new ‘Lab Captain’ I’m told that I’ll be spending up to 300 hours over the next 12 months developing the content and scenarios, building the lab, supporting it at VMworld and Partner Exchange and keeping the content up to date as new releases to our software comes out. Gulp.
We had our first all-hands call on the process last week and I am delighted there are plenty of ‘old hands’ with many years experience that the new folks can learn from. Also a lot of the core technology will be provided prebuilt in Pods we can leverage – prebuilt vCenters, nested ESXi, virtual storage etc etc. This helps speed the process up and also ensures the demand on the supporting back-end cloud is known and predictable which is key. To put this in perspective, I understand that last year over 100,000 labs were taken online and at our events – that probably means over 1,000,000 VMs!
My lab for 2014 is HOL-SDC-1416 – ‘vCloud Suite Use Cases – Optimized Capacity and Operations’
Next step is to work with the Content Lead and Lab Principle to build the story board then we can start building the content…hopefully my next post will be about this. Meantime there is already a massive amount of lab content in the VMware Hands on Labs that you can try out now!
Finally, check out the official VMware Hands on Labs Blog: http://blogs.vmware.com/hol/vmworld-hands-on-labs
CloudyTechnologist 