Browsing Posts tagged Labs

Reading Time: < 1 minute Neil Anderson, from Flackbox, has realize a free ebook on ‘How to Build a NetApp ONTAP Lab… For Free’. In it he provide a complete step-by-step instructions, with screenshots, about how to build a fully ready and complete NetApp simulator lab from scratch, using NetApp’s latest operating system ONTAP 9. Almost all NetApp features can be practised and tested using the lab. You can use it as a study tool or for testing features before deploying them in your production environment. The book is available on this site.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Ravello ’s Smart Labs have self-contained capsules to run your VMware/KVM development, test, training and demo environments in the cloud without migration. One unique feature of Ravello platform is that you can simple run on AWS or Google Cloud, without any changes,  VMware vSphere workload or also ESXi nested! It’s very nice for testing or lab purpose, where you don’t need anymore of local resources and you can have the speed and the elasticy of the cloud.

Reading Time: 7 minutes Ravello was founded in early 2011 with the sole purpose of changing the way companies, large and small consume the public cloud. Ravello’s Smart Labs have self-contained capsules to run your VMware/KVM development, test, training and demo environments in the cloud without migration. They are using AWS and Google as an underlying IaaS platform to offer IaaS services (and more) over that with really interesting costs and flexibility. But much important they are giving a powerful platform to manage your “applications” (that are similar as a vApp concept).

Reading Time: 7 minutes If you plan to build a lab for vSphere 6.0 you can use all the approches for vSphere 5.x (see also Building a vSphere 5 lab): usually using a nested environment (or three physical systems, if you have) as a common platform. Of course, the other way to test new products it’s just use the VMware Hands on Labs that you can also “broke” or use in a different path compared to the one suggested by the guide. But having a local environment permit more flexibility and more time for testing or learning. The big […]

Reading Time: 5 minutes Build a vCloud lab is interesting to increase your skill and knowledge, make some test and of course preparing for the VCAP-CIA exam. If you build on a ESXi nested environment you will not have too much problem (except with old hardware that may not support complete ESXi nesting with vSphere 5.1). With a VMware Workstation environment (of course with enough memory and resources) could be more fun and portable. But could be more difficult if you plan to use vCloud Director virtual appliance.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Some months ago I’ve write about the VMware Hands on Labs and how labs are important for testing and learning about a product (also for other vendor). Events like VMworld, Microsoft TechEd, Dell Storage Forum, HP Discover, … are a good moment to have access at those kind of labs. But of course you can also build your own labs (as described in this post) but this require more effort. A good work-around is use on-line and on-demand lab. For VMware the on-line version is just in beta, but for Microsoft this kind of tools […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes Everybody that has attend at least at one VMworld, or at a VMware Partner Exchange, event probably know what is a Hands on Labs (HoL) and probably has run at least a lab. HoL are probably one of the best reason to attend at this kind of event (and also this year were really good) because you can make practice on VMware technologies, and also (in the recent years) are well designed to be scenario oriented (and usually scenarios could be really close to the real world). The HoL infrastructure is really cool (and a […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes For people that need to make practice for the VCAP-DCA exam (and the beta of VCAP5-DCA will start soon) a good lab environment is mandatory. But it could also be useful for other reasons, like demo environment. There are several options to build one, but most used solutions are using nested hosts on one physical system with: VMware Workstation/Fusion over a host OS: common for a notebook. ESXi 5 on a server or a whitebox: common if you plan to have a always-on or fixed solution. Actually both solution could be good, but Workstation could […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes There are some cases, like for test and/or labs (but not only), where could be useful convert a local storage to a shared storage compatible with VMware vSphere (or other hypervisors). For local storage inside the host, the simplest solution is look for a virtual appliance that is designed for this scope (search for VSA – Virtual Storage Appliance). For a storage hosted on a Linux/Unix machine, probably the simplest solution is share the space with the NFS Server (of course it will be limited only to VMware vSphere). And when the storage is on […]

© 2024-2011 vInfrastructure Blog | Disclaimer & Copyright