{"id":8962,"date":"2007-06-18T12:31:00","date_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=8962"},"modified":"2007-06-18T12:31:00","modified_gmt":"1999-11-29T20:00:00","slug":"technet-virtual-labs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=8962","title":{"rendered":"TechNet Virtual Labs"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">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.\u00a0 Well, MS has been hosting these labs on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/technet\/traincert\/virtuallab\/default.mspx\">TechNet Virtual Labs<\/a> for quite some time.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never had a look at them before today \u2026 I\u2019ve been doing some research for work and wanted to get some hands-on with a few products.<\/span><\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">Here are my thoughts on the service:<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">It\u2019s free so that\u2019s good.<\/span><\/font>\n<\/li>\n<li><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">Each lab is limited to 90 minutes.\u00a0 Some labs require only 30 minutes but some require the full allotment.\u00a0 That can be a pain in the @$$ if you get interrupted by phone calls, workmates asking questions, etc.<\/span><\/font>\n<\/li>\n<li><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">The labs vary in difficulty and complexity from easy installations to complex configurations.<\/span><\/font>\n<\/li>\n<li><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">They are very structured so you\u2019ll still need your own virtual labs and evaluation\/TechNet editions of software to play around with your customised configurations.<\/span><\/font>\n<\/li>\n<li><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">For me at least, the labs were slow and I\u2019m working at an ISP at the moment so bandwidth was not an issue \u2026 I suspect that latency was the problem.\u00a0 We\u2019ll have to wait on astrophysicists to invent \u201cwormhole networking\u201d to get over that issue.<\/span><\/font>\n<\/li>\n<li><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">It\u2019s pretty handy to get an idea of the look and feel of the products.<\/span><\/font> <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">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.\u00a0 Without them, I would have (a) known what SMS could do for me and (b) wouldn\u2019t have been interested in MOM as an enterprise monitoring solution.<\/span><\/font>\n<\/p>\n<p><font face=\"Arial\" size=\"2\"><span lang=\"EN-IE\" style=\"font-size:10pt;font-family:Arial\">So, if you are interested in some solution from MS, forget wading through brochures and endless marketing babble.\u00a0 Fire up the free virtual labs, download the lab manuals and work through step-by-steps to see what you are facing.\u00a0 You should then have a read of the product documentation in the <a href=\"http:\/\/technet.microsoft.com\/en-us\/library\/default.aspx\">TechNet Library<\/a> to see what your planning and design issues will be.<\/span><\/font> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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.\u00a0 Well, MS has been hosting these labs on TechNet Virtual Labs for quite some time.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never had &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/?p=8962\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;TechNet Virtual Labs&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8962\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aidanfinn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}