Taking Vmware VCP4 training Online

Hello,

Been gone a while but I am back, employer is paying for:

VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V4.1]

I am taking the online version, never really played around with WebEx and such, just wondering if anyone has taken VMware training online, what was your experience?

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bcairns

Just in case anyone else stumbles into this and wondered the answer.

WebEx is very easy to setup and use.
You have to install an application called to view the encrypted PDF files for the class and the labs.

There are two instructors, and the class in a lecture / lab / lecture / lab style.

Can't really discuss the material (for obvious reasons)

So far very strait forward and easy to

powerfool

I am scheduled to take the course at UCSC Extension starting October 2nd. I know that there were a few folks here scheduled to take the course over the summer; I would love to get their take on this course. I am taking this on top of a 6 credit hour course for my masters' degree and, of course, work. I would love to get the thing knocked out within a few weeks (someone at UCSC said that many students complete it within five weeks, as it is self-paced). I already have loads of experience with VMWare in the ESXi 3.5 and vCenter days. My big Exchange 2010 migration will also be in a VMWare environment, so I want to get caught up on what is current. I am having a very difficult time with the design because we are virtualized and using a nice SAN... but the other folks are looking to design it as if we are using physical machines and cheap DAS. I have gotten them to compromise a little, but it needs to be more drastic.

blargoe

Anyone else taken the online version of any of the official VMware curriculum? I'm likely going this route next time; I have a mandate to keep travel costs down.

scott28tt

@bcairns: A quick question - why are you taking the 4.1 ICM course if you're already a VCP4? You will benefit more from something like the Troubleshooting or Manage for Performance courses...

I deliver all the official vSphere courses for Global Knowledge in the UK, and have done some via Webex - the experience is different from being in class - the real benefit is the reduction on travel time and costs.

Scott.

Everyone

powerfool wrote: »

My big Exchange 2010 migration will also be in a VMWare environment, so I want to get caught up on what is current. I am having a very difficult time with the design because we are virtualized and using a nice SAN... but the other folks are looking to design it as if we are using physical machines and cheap DAS. I have gotten them to compromise a little, but it needs to be more drastic.

If you're going to use DAGs in your design, you have to treat the MB servers as if you were using physical machines. You cannot use vmware's high availability features (like vMotion) on a MB server that is part of a DAG.

You really have to analyze your current usage, projected growth, etc. and determine if virtualizing your Exchange environment is really the way to go for it. One place I did a 2003 to 2010 migration, I ended up going with 2 physical blades for a combined active/active CAS/HT/MB (DAG) setup for ~4000 mailboxes. It ended up being cheaper and performing better than splitting the roles up and running 4 to 6 VMs. The hardware demands that Exchange was going to have for the number of users and volume of e-mails handled, would have meant we couldn't run any other VMs on a given ESX cluster node at the same time, so it would have been like dedicating hardware to it anyway.

Sometimes a hybrid approach may work best, certain roles on physical, others on virtual. This is what we're doing for the environment I work in now. I've got over 60,000 mailboxes to migrate from 2003 to 2010, MB servers will be physical, and the other roles virtual.

If you do virtualize everything, I'd recommend giving your MB servers direct access to the SAN, instead of using virtual drives.

undomiel

No quite true, as of Exchange 2010 SP1 Microsoft does support Live Migration (vMotion).

All planned migration must either result in shutdown and cold boot, or an online migration that makes use of a technology like Hyper-V Live Migration. Hypervisor migration of virtual machines is supported by the hypervisor vendor; therefore, you must ensure that your hypervisor vendor has tested and supports migration of Exchange virtual machines. Microsoft supports Hyper-V Live Migration of these virtual machines.

Exchange 2010 System Requirements: Exchange 2010 SP1 Help

Everyone

undomiel wrote: »

No quite true, as of Exchange 2010 SP1 Microsoft does support Live Migration (vMotion).

Exchange 2010 System Requirements: Exchange 2010 SP1 Help

Cool, didn't know they had added support for that in SP1. All design work I've done was pre-SP1, so haven't had a need to go back and look at that for quite some time. Nice that they added support for the UM role too.

powerfool

Well, I didn't intend to hijack the thread... sorry for that.

We are mandated to move to a fully virtualized Exchange environment by policy... costs... well, they could be brushed aside, but even though we are setting up a dedicated VMWare cluster(s), it is slightly cheaper based off of our design, which includes the VMWare E+ licenses and our SAN with a purchase of more storage for it.

We are going multi-role as that has become the standard recommendation from Microsoft. It has come to light that Microsoft actually only recommended separate roles in 2007 because they technically could not put all of the roles on the same system in a clustered implementation. Now, there are other reasons that that setup can be determined, but MS now says go multi-role until you can justify doing otherwise. Plus, we actually have a Microsoft engineer on-site every other week based on our enterprise agreement.

That being said, everyone is afraid to design then implementation based on the sum total of the products we are using. There are best practices outline by both VMWare and separately by our SAN vendor that recommend two intrasite DAG members and one remote DAG member for each of our primary sites, based on our sizing; our SAN vendor further would recommend only two intrasite DAG members and use their SAN replication to get the data offsite, falling back to the third member offsite as a secondary option.

Bottom line is that the storage changes in Exchange 2010 were for Microsoft's own purposes for Exchange Online. They want to implement the "Google model" where they have a bunch of cheap servers. I think that ignoring more enterprise class options for their customers is a mistake, unless they want to go back and do this for every product that they have... because companies are making huge investments in storage and virtualization as an overall strategy and they want to leverage their existing investments and strategy; in other words, don't miss the forest for the trees.

skinsFan202

Just thought I'd share my recent experience. I took the VCP5 Install Configure Manage course through a training vendor online just this past week. It was via WebEx. Books were shipped to me a week ahead of time and the instructor e-mailed me the link to join the session which also prompts you for some browser plug-in required by Webex. You were required to have a microphone headset of some sort to be able to interact with the instructor and other students. Labs were done through remote VNC client.

The biggest draw for taking it online is the reduced cost of travel. You get the convenience of being able to roll out of bed 15 minutes before your class starts and grabbing a banana or bowl of cereal and sitting down at your desk. I'd say that when you register, pay attention to the time of when the class starts if you take it online and the timezone of the instructor. We had students from different time zones. The instructor was from Texas and he ran the class on CST beginning at 9am so that meant if you lived in Cali you were waking up to start the class at 7am, etc. All in all I felt like it was almost as good as taking the course in-person. I'm a Cisco noob so most of the material was very foreign to me. However, at the end of the week I felt it was a very solid intro to the world of VMware and helped me understand what I will need to pass the VCP exam.

I had a fantastic instructor and have always been a believer that no matter the training vendor or format in which you take the class, your success with any of these training courses all depends on the instructor you have. If anyone is looking for recommendation of a great instructor for online training vcp5 class, give me a shout and I can point you in the right direction.

blargoe

I took the vSphere MFP course a couple of weeks ago online. I thought that being online didn't detract too much from it; it was just fine. The only thing about this class specifically (the instructor said this session was a rarity for the online courses) was that only two people "showed up" for the class. So there was little discussion outside of the lecture and lab delivery, unless one of us had a question.