ESXLab Self-Study Lab Rentals

1. VMware vSphere 6.5 with ESXi and vCenter
2. VMware vSphere 6.5 Boot Camp
3. 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)
• One or 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 (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:

1. Install of ESXi 6.5 and perform post-install configurations
2. Create, update Network Standard vSwitches. Use NIC Teams for performance and redundancy
3. Perform advanced networking tasks including vSwitch security and Jumbo Frames (requires Boot Camp study guide add-on)
   
4. Define, connect to and browse NFS file shares. Create a Content Library and add ISO images
5. 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
6. Manually export a VM in Open Virtual Machine Format and then import it as a new VM
   
7. Install and configure the vCenter Server Appliance
8. Configure Single Sign On (SSO) identity sources including Active Directory
9. Configure vCenter's inventory views to organize inventory objects
10. Configure and use VMware Next Generation Web Client
11. Work with Clones and Templates. Convert a VM into a template. Rapidly deploy new VMs from template. Copy VMs using cloning.
12. Use guest OS customization to easily change the identity of a VM. Create, update and deploy VMs using Guest OS Customization Specifications
13. 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
14. Configure and test hotplug memory. Create multi-core vCPUs
15. Work with vCenter permissions. Use and customize Roles
16. vCenter alarms for monitoring key infrastructure objects. Send SNMP traps to a trap receiver on high VM resource consumption
17. Configure ESXi for iSCSI Storage Area Networks. Connecting to shared iSCSI storage
18. 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)
19. Create, manage and monitor Resource Pools. Work with resource tuning settings.
20. VM migration including Cold Migration, Storage Migration and VMotion
21. Automated VM resource load balancing with DRS clusters
22. Use HA clusters to minimize VM down time due to server failures
23. Use Fault Tolerance to configure a VM for 100% availability (requires Boot Camp study guide add-on)
24. Hot replicate and restore VMs using VMware Replication
25. Set up VMware Update Manager to patch/update ESXi hosts
26. Create, configure and administer Distributed Virtual Switches (requires Boot Camp study guide add-on)
27. Performance analysis and benchmarking storage and networking