Virtualize the Net

This was a cool session. I was able to see Prabhu Barathi and Mike Fortuna (sorry, no twitter, please remind him about that) again after seeing them in the last VMUG and meet other VMware administrators who were eager to learn about NSX. I also got to meet Julie Starr, who is a firewall specialist inside the NSX team (I put some of her blog posts here).

The dynamics consisted of VMware employees giving you a more technical presentation than you would get at a VMUG, with people testing out the homelabs, and basically answering every question that came up. This is actually very important, because the people that showed up (over 100 signed up, we had three simultaneous classes on this date) have different backgrounds: from CCIE or firewall specialists with no VMware experience, to students that are just learning about VMware. The work of teaching and explaining about NSX is quite difficult since it encompasses so many skills until you get the "aha" moment.

The website that features the Hands On Labs is web.hol.vmware.com/socialabs . You can create an account and possibly also have these HOLs count for cloudcredibility.com (this is a great list of all the NSX tasks https://www.cloudcredibility.com/nsx/tasks/list ).

Some excellent tips for the labs:

1) Increase the Hands on Labs VM resolution. By default it's not set to the maximum!




2) Use the "More Options" on the Manual and select Split Screen



Tell it to send the manual link to your e-mail. This is a special link that gives you the manual in full screen (without the whole HOL)




3) HOL documentation in PDF and HTML format is also available at docs.hol.vmware.com