One of the things I like about IT Forum (TechNet for IT infrastructure types in Europe), aside from the seminars, is that you can get your hands on lots of labs and walkthroughs on the latest technology. Well, MS has been hosting these labs on TechNet Virtual Labs for quite some time. I’ve never had a look at them before today … I’ve been doing some research for work and wanted to get some hands-on with a few products.
Here are my thoughts on the service:
- It’s free so that’s good.
- Each lab is limited to 90 minutes. Some labs require only 30 minutes but some require the full allotment. That can be a pain in the @$$ if you get interrupted by phone calls, workmates asking questions, etc.
- The labs vary in difficulty and complexity from easy installations to complex configurations.
- They are very structured so you’ll still need your own virtual labs and evaluation/TechNet editions of software to play around with your customised configurations.
- For me at least, the labs were slow and I’m working at an ISP at the moment so bandwidth was not an issue … I suspect that latency was the problem. We’ll have to wait on astrophysicists to invent “wormhole networking” to get over that issue.
- It’s pretty handy to get an idea of the look and feel of the products.
The conference labs (in conjunction with seminars and my own labs) played a major role in me getting interested in SMS 2003 and MOM 2005 a few years ago. Without them, I would have (a) known what SMS could do for me and (b) wouldn’t have been interested in MOM as an enterprise monitoring solution.
So, if you are interested in some solution from MS, forget wading through brochures and endless marketing babble. Fire up the free virtual labs, download the lab manuals and work through step-by-steps to see what you are facing. You should then have a read of the product documentation in the TechNet Library to see what your planning and design issues will be.