vSphere Design Workshop

As those who follow me on twitter will know this week I attended the vSphere Design Workshop course, as many were asking me my thoughts on the course I thought I would do a short blog post.

I as many other consultants working for VMware partners are required to attend this course for our partner accreditations levels, this sounds good to me I’m always interested in more training! Prior to going on the course I had heard some negative feedback regarding the course content but despite this I attended with an open mind.

I was hoping to bring back from the course some new ideas and understanding of the design process, learn how others were tackling design scenarios and refresh my mind on some of the design elements within vSphere.  The course is made up of 55% lecture and 45% lab exercise and it would be recommended that you were already at VCP level before attending. 

http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www&a=one&id_subject=12393

I attended the course at Megirus in the UK, we had a nice sized class with 9 attendees all from different backgrounds and we were  lucky enough that 2 attendees were VMware trainers looking at the class content for the first time.

I’m not going to go into detail of the course content as that is what the course is for but I personally found the information extremely useful. The main take away information was bought on from the discussions within the class prompted by the class material and the trainer. I was lucky enough to be in a class where everyone would openly talk about their experiences, problems and findings within their designs and installations. If you were unlucky enough to attend a class where people weren’t keen to take part in the discussions openly I believe you could end up being a bit disappointed.

I found the later labs in the course a little dry and thought that if the lab data that was mentioned was actually shown in capacity planner it would have bought a bit more depth and relevance to these labs, apart from this I was very pleased with what I learnt and will now be taking what I have learnt and using it in future design engagements.

So if you are involved with designing vSphere infrastructures and have the opportunity to attend I would recommend attending the course. Don’t expect it to be an all out technical course, don’t expect it to set you up ready for a VCDX or give you the ability to design an infrastructure if you not already a VCP and start the course prepared to participate in the discussions.