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VMworld 2010: My Lab Environment Experience

Overview

I don’t have all of the numbers memorized, but here’s what I remember off the top of my head:

  • They had about 400 lab stations available, each with a WYSE thin client and two monitors.
  • Everything was “in the cloud” running from data centers across the country, none of them local.
  • Each lab’s VMs were created and destroyed on demand.
  • One monitor had the virtual environment and the other had your PDF lab guide.
  • Over the course of the conference they created/destroyed nearly 20,000 VMs.

Some Problems

I had to re-take a couple of labs due to some slowness issues. These appeared to be due to some storage latency when certain combinations of labs were turned up at the same time. I overheard some of the lab guides asking people to move to a different workstation when they complained of slowness. They explained that, by moving to a different station you would be logging in to a different cluster of servers, which would possibly help speed you up. I opted to come back later and re-take the two troubled labs. I was only able to get in 8 lab sessions as a result. I could have potentially completed 10 or 11.

Most of the time the lab VMs were very responsive and I was able to complete them with plenty of time to spare. The default time alloted was 90 minutes, but they would adjust that down to as low as 60 minutes if there was a long line in the waiting area. Prior to one lab session, I had to wait in the “Pit Stop” area before my session. Here’s a photo I snapped while waiting:

IMG_3174

List of Labs I Took

Here’s the list of labs I sat through:

  • Troubleshooting vSphere
  • Performance Tuning
  • ESXi Remote Management Utilities
  • Site Recovery Manager Basic Install & Config
  • Site Recovery Manager Extended Config & Troubleshooting
  • Vmware vCenter Data Recovery
  • VMware vSphere PowerCLI
  • Vmware vShield

Overall Impression

My overall impression of the lab environment was positive. Despite a few performance issues, I think they did an excellent job of presenting a very large volume of labs. I certainly learned a lot while sitting the labs and look forward to taking more next year. I’m sure the labs team gathered a lot of data which will help them improve the lab performance for next year as well.