ESXLab Self-Study Lab Rentals
Dedicated, VMware ready Lab Rentals for vSphere 6.5 self-study practice. People rent our labs for many reasons including: VMware Certified Professional - DataCenter Virtualization certification exam preparation, to practice upgrading to vSphere 6.5, to safely learn new features and more. Our labs work perfectly with the following ESXLab courses:
- VMware vSphere 6.5 with ESXi and vCenter
- VMware vSphere 6.5 Boot Camp
- VMware vSphere 6.5 Optimize, Upgrade, Troubleshoot
Each lab rental includes a copy of our VMware vSphere 6.5 with ESXi and vCenter Boot Camp Lab guide. Your Lab guide is delivered in digital / PDF format (discretely watermarked with their names and e-mail address) directly to you by e-mail. We need a minimum of one business day advanced notice to provision and release your labs.
What You Get
The success of your VMware self-study lab rental is our top priority. To guarantee you successful lab rental, we:
- Release labs to you on your preferred starting date (subject to availability)
- Provide you with always ready, dedicated labs that are available 24hrs/day for the duration of your rental
- Provide e-mail support during your lab rental via our Trouble Ticketing system
- Provide access via Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS / RDP) and via our HTML 5 compliant browser based interface
Why Rent our Labs?
People rent ESXLab's vSphere remote lab environments for many reasons:
- Get
hands-on lab practice before challenging the VMware Certified
Professional - Datacenter Virtualization (VCP-DCV) certification
- Practice labs suitable for Certified Virtualization Professional certification preparation
- Build skill, knowledge and confidence needed to help you advance in your career
- Practice upgrades, reconfiguration or other major changes in a non-production environment
- Gain
immediate access to fully functional labs (includes DNS, DHCP, AD,
iSCSI, etc.) rather than trying to build everything yourself
- Media images provided in your lab rental
Server Pod Configuration
A server Pod is a set of one or more virtual servers organized into a lab (we call a pod). We have sufficient facility to comfortably support 150+ learners concurrently - with no slow downs or resource contention. Our labs are dedicated to each customer (not shared) and are available 24hrs/day during the lab rental period.
Each server pod contains:
- A remote Windows Server 2008 R2 desktop to access your lab environment (access via a web browser or RDP / RDS)
- Two virtual ESXi hosts with 4 CPU cores, 12+ GB of RAM and 150GB of local storage
- An Active Directory server configured for the esxlab.com domain
- Full DNS and DHCP services
- An iSCSI SAN with 5 generously sized volumes (4x30GB and 1x50GB LUNs) for ESXi shared storage labs
- A gateway router for full Internet connectivity
- Professional hosting at our datacenter
- Full support during your rental
Lab Tasks
Your included lab guide will provide detailed, step-by-step instructions for completing the following lab tasks:
- Install of ESXi 6.5 and perform post-install configurations
- Create, update Network Standard vSwitches. Use NIC Teams for performance and redundancy
- Perform advanced networking tasks including vSwitch security and Jumbo Frames (requires Boot Camp study guide add-on)
- Define, connect to and browse NFS file shares. Create a Content Library and add ISO images
- Create a Virtual Machine and install a guest OS into the VM. Install VMware Tools into the VM. Add 3rd party tools and utilities to the VM
- Manually export a VM in Open Virtual Machine Format and then import it as a new VM
- Install and configure the vCenter Server Appliance
- Configure Single Sign On (SSO) identity sources including Active Directory
- Configure vCenter's inventory views to organize inventory objects
- Configure and use VMware Next Generation Web Client
- Work with Clones and Templates. Convert a VM into a template. Rapidly deploy new VMs from template. Copy VMs using cloning.
- Use guest OS customization to easily change the identity of a VM. Create, update and deploy VMs using Guest OS Customization Specifications
- Work with virtual disks. Hot add a secondary virtual disk. Grow a non-system volume. Grow a Windows system disk and increase it's partitions without the need for 3rd party tools
- Configure and test hotplug memory. Create multi-core vCPUs
- Work with vCenter permissions. Use and customize Roles
- vCenter alarms for monitoring key infrastructure objects. Send SNMP traps to a trap receiver on high VM resource consumption
- Configure ESXi for iSCSI Storage Area Networks. Connecting to shared iSCSI storage
- Use Raw Device Maps to provide direct VM to SAN LUN connectivity. Configure and use your new RDM in Windows Server 2008 (requires Boot Camp study guide add-on)
(requires Boot Camp study guide add-on) - Create, manage and monitor Resource Pools. Work with resource tuning settings.
- VM migration including Cold Migration, Storage Migration and VMotion
- Automated VM resource load balancing with DRS clusters
- Use HA clusters to minimize VM down time due to server failures
- Use Fault Tolerance to configure a VM for 100% availability (requires Boot Camp study guide add-on)
- Hot replicate and restore VMs using VMware Replication
- Set up VMware Update Manager to patch/update ESXi hosts
- Create, configure and administer Distributed Virtual Switches (requires Boot Camp study guide add-on)
- Performance analysis and benchmarking storage and networking