My review of the vSphere Design Workshop

Essendon

Finally managed to coax my employer to send me on this training, small victory in this! Runs for three days and begins tomorrow. Will post back a breakdown of how each day goes. Might just benefit other TE members who may be looking at this training.

From what I've heard, VMware have picked up their game recently so I should hopefully be able to get a lot out of this. Added bonuses are the 100% exam voucher and a free exam prep workshop for the DCD.

I've a very sore throat and can barely speak as of today. Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow, hard to concentrate when you're feverish and on tablets.

jibbajabba

Great stuff. Hopefully your course is more than just a glorified sales pitch like the one I have been on.

Essendon

Day 1

Most of the day was a rehash of all the stuff that vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 offer. Just the kind of stuff you could read off Scott Lowe's book. I didnt learn anything today. Towards the end of the day the instructor asked the class to work on a sample design for an SMB for a P2V project. We did bits and pieces of the storage aspect of the design.

Overall, I expected more out of today. The workshop should be about why you'd choose one thing over another and how your decisions would affect parts of your design. The instructor was good, he was pretty knowledgeable but he concentrated on talking about the good stuff (SDRS, FT, NPIV, vDS type things). When asked he'd answer as to why one thing was better than the next, but only when asked. Whether he was laying a foundation for the next two days, I'll find out tomorrow.

The class was a mix of folks with varying levels of experience and expertise with VMware's products. There were a couple of architects, some were sys admins and another was a network guy (dunno what he was doing there). Hopefully, day 2 will be put to better use.

dave330i

Due to the varying knowledge of students, you're not going to get very deep in design.

jibbajabba

So not much different then. dave, whilst I agree to a degree, this is a specialised course which isn't cheap. There should not be a need to re-cap basics.

Target Audience
VMware pre- and postsales technical
professionals responsible for
designing vSphere architectures

Prerequisites
Knowledge of vSphere 5 installation,
upgrade, configuration, and
administration

Sorry, just frustrated a bit when this comes up as I paid for this course myself and came back with nothing (felt like it anyway).

blargoe

I hope your 2nd and 3rd days are more in depth...

I'm thinking about requesting this course, but since I'm probably only going to get one paid training opportunity this year, I want to make it count.

Essendon

Day 2

Better than Day 1, thankfully. We did 2 design scenarios for the same SMB, this time it was the host and networking aspects. The instructor went into details about HA and DRS, the kind of stuff you'd read in the Deepdive book. Nothing to do with design per se, but still not a bad discussion. He talked at length about choosing vDS's over vSS's, why/when/where you'd implement NIOC/SIOC/DirectPathI/O and what all to keep in mind when buying hosts/cards/arrays.

Overall a much better outcome on Day 2. He engaged the class well, everyone talked. The 2 architects in the class spoke about some of the designs that had put in and what they learned from the experience. A good day! Let's see what Day 3 has in store. I'm going to ask the instructor to talk about a design or two that he's put in.

astorrs

Essendon wrote: »

I'm going to ask the instructor to talk about a design or two that he's put in.

Most VMware instructors are just that: Staff Instructors who may not have ever implemented a real world design. That's not to say they aren't full or good advice, etc. but if you're looking for real-world (outside a lab in Palo Alto), you're likely asking the wrong person.

meadIT

I've been lucky in that regard. My design class instructor was an EMC (I think?) field engineer that also did training and my vSphere Fast Track instructor was Chris McCain, who has since obtained his VCDX.

Essendon

Day 3

The instructor carried on the momentum from day 2. There were a few interesting discussions regarding choice of hosts in clusters, number of hosts in a cluster and VM sizing. He talked at length about resource pools, and how some of his clients made wrong decisions about putting VM's in pools (and not putting them in pools). Not a bad day, apart from the bad cold I've had. I was sneezing my head off which didnt make things any better.

Conclusion:

Attend the training only if your employer is paying for it. Do not spend your own coin on this. There should be a lot of emphasis on the design aspects rather than how a particular thing works. Like yesterday, the instructor was talking about HA and one of the students asked a question. For the next hour, we only talked about isolation response and application monitoring. The discussion was a good technical deepdive, but that's not what the course was for. I felt the course was an advanced Optimize and Scale rather than Design. Great discussions here and there, but not Design focused. You could get the same kind of information from Duncan Epping's and Scott Lowe's books too. I wouldnt call it a waste of time (for me, that is) but if you are in a design role already, you'll probably not learn much.

scott28tt

My experience of the Design class - the success of it is determined by the instructor, but also by the students - by it's very nature design can be a subjective thing, the sharing of ideas and opinions during the discussions in the class are different each time.

Essendon

I agree with you Scott, my instructor was Mark Elliott, an accomplished trainer and consultant, but the students had vastly varying levels of experience. There was this one guy who spoke nothing during the entire time and seemed completely out of depth. Then there were folks like me, in fact the majority of students had no design experience or very little of it. The two architects in the class were the only ones who had actually designed an environment, if there had been more of them, the experience may have been much better.