Here’s one for all you vSphere lab fans out there… During the recent VMworld Europe event in Copenhagen I took some time to speak with my fellow vSpecialist colleague Chris Horn (@Horn_Chris) who, along with his team, put together the highly successful EMC hands on labs environment for this and the VMware San Francisco and Cisco Live events.  I know from working along side Chris and others at both VMworld events this year that the hands on lab format was very popular with attendees indeed.  It was clear that people liked getting their hands on the products and actually getting hands on time with them out rather than being bombarded with conference marketing fluff and glossy colour brochures. 

As you’ll see from the video (below) the EMC hands on lab environment presented the attendees with a number of labs to work through, each of which covered one of EMC’s products or technology sets.  The hands on lab platform ran on VMware vSphere.  The labs included:

• EMC Avamar: Backups
• EMC Symmetrix VMAX: VAAI
• VPLEX: Storage federation & data availability (DA) in a VMware vSphere metro environment
• EMC Celerra: Plug-ins
• EMC Data Domain: Data de-duplication
• RSA enVision: Event log consolidation and environment compliance

Attendees could do one or as many of these different labs that was of interest or that they had time to do.  We actually had some people sit down for a couple of hours to work through the all of the labs – impressive!

The labs environment was run on VMware vSphere using the following hardware:

Compute:

• Cisco UCS Blade Enclosure and Blade Servers
• Dell PowerEdge R610 Rack Mount Servers

Storage:

• EMC Symmetrix VMAX SE (Single Engine)
• Iomega IX12-300r
• Iomega IX4-200r

Other:

• Cisco 6100 Fabric Interconnect

Network:

• Cisco 5010 Switch

So if you appreciate a good lab setup and want to find out more about the lab and how it is configured then you will enjoy the video (above).

Thanks for Chris for taking the time to run through the lab environment – great guy to work with!