Right after passing my VCP5 last week I was contacted by a colleague from Slovakia who asked if I could provide an presentation to VMware vSphere. I liked the idea and asked in our team if someone would like to attend as well. Another colleague who's currently in a desktop support role and plans to upskill also showed interest, thus I started preparing a small workshop for them.
The workshop was time constrained (one day maximum), therefore I decided to articulate its content as follows:
2 hours theory, including among others:
- basic introduction to type 1 & type 2 hypervisors
- company-related stuff (virtualization standards, current infrastructure & design)
- quick ESXi vs Hyper-V feature comparison (+explanation of Transparent Page Sharing, ballooning, vMotion, svMotion)
- Presentation of ESXi and vSphere / vCenter
- VM hardware, Thin/Thick disks
- Review of all vSphere features with comments/quick explanations
- VM Networking
3 hours hands-on lab, including:
- Installation of 2 VMware ESXi hosts
- Basic host setup (setting up NTP, configuring iSCSI software adapter, adding iSCSI targets)
- Storage and VM Networking, Introduction to datastores
- Creating a Windows VM / Installing vCenter Server 5
- Configuring vCenter Server 5
- Datacenters
- Clusters
- Configure a port group for vMotion
- High Availability
- Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
- Datastore Clusters & Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (sDRS)
- Working with the VMware vSphere Client (presentation of the various tabs, performance etc..)
- Creating and working with VMs (snapshots, clones, templates)
In my opinion the theory part was quite dense, grabbing all these concepts in just two hours must not have been easy. The hands-on lab part was packed as well but was probably more enjoyable as colleagues got to interact and experiment. Techies love to get the ability to click everywhere!
The feedback from my colleagues was very positive, I am looking forward to their written comments on the content and the format of this workshop. I hope to have the possibility to provide more trainings like this in the future.
I started my career in IT 13 years ago by teaching people how to use computers so this was a good occasion to rehearse public speaking and appraise my communication skills. It's good to note that experience is like a good wine, the older the better.