How Ascend Cloud Solutions builds scalable VMware labs

In his 1958 essay "I, Pencil", Leonard Read explored the family tree of that everyday item. He described the many hands and many processes that lead to the creation of a single pencil. From foresters to hauliers. From factory sweepers to lighthouse keepers.

Cloud computing may seem a world away from the simple pencil. But Leonard Read's lesson applies. While the cloud world yearns for its single pane of glass, it's nevertheless built from a diverse and even bewildering array of people, places and processes.

Here at Ascend Cloud Solutions, our involvement in building VMware labs makes us keenly aware of this productive ecosystem.

Look at it this way. Cloud engineers must be trained. To train cloud engineers, courses must be delivered. To deliver courses, labs must be built, administered and troubleshooted. Building, administering and troubleshooting labs requires infrastructure. This infrastructure needs to be installed and maintained… And on it goes.

Our role is to provide high-quality lab hosting services for VMware Education Delivery Partners (VEDPs). A big part of this is providing capacity and ensuring high performance. But it also involves behind-the-scenes troubleshooting that comes from years of VMware expertise.

This backend provision plays a crucial part in training up the next generation of cloud engineers. In this article, we take a closer look at how we provide the environments where learning can be brought to life.

Building a positive UX for students and teachers

So often in life, performance is sacrificed for profit. In the case of cloud computing labs, this involves cramming students onto courses with insufficient infrastructure. The result? Money for the providers and a wretched experience for the students.

After all, these courses are meant to give learners hands-on experience with complex cloud environments. This simply isn't possible if they have to contend with sluggish loading times and buggy interfaces.

At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we recognise that it takes a lot of horsepower to run a lab. On average, we lavish half a terabyte and around 32 cores per student.

For the course providers who use our services, this means confidence that their staff can deliver courses to happy, engaged learners without worrying about performance issues.

24/7 support

When it comes to scalable VMware labs, provision isn't enough. Equally important is proactive troubleshooting.

It's easy to see why. If a lab fails, learning is interrupted. This isn't just a pain in the neck – it can also reduce student engagement and even student retention.

What every course provider needs is backroom support. And, here at Ascend Cloud Solutions, we provide it around the clock.

Our support portal is accessible to instructors 24/7. And when we say "accessible", we don't just mean that an instructor can log their problem and then twiddle their thumbs until we lumber into action.

No, our response times are lightning-fast – typically between 15 and 30 minutes. This is because we classify issues with VMware labs as "priority one". That's the same priority level as downtime in corporate cloud environments. If a student can't take their next step, we take it extremely seriously.

Our troubleshooting covers the whole lab environment, from nested lab environments to the underlying infrastructure. That means we take responsibility for problems caused by students, such as accidental changes to settings, as well as our own mistakes.

Empowering learners with knowledge

All learners using the labs we host have full access to our knowledge base (KB). This is a repository of support articles, technical guidance and troubleshooting information to help users fix problems before they come to us for direct intervention.

So, if a learner makes a mistake, misconfigures or misses a step, they can easily discover where they went wrong. These resources cover key VMware products like HCX, VCF and Tanzu Kubernetes.

This isn't just a time-saving exercise. It also encourages learners to figure out how to fix their own mistakes – a vital skill for cloud engineers at all levels.

The importance of expertise

It's not just how we build scalable VMware labs that matters. It's also who's building them.

At Ascend Cloud Solutions, our lab hosting services are manned by ex-VMware employees who know the ropes like few others on Earth.

This is partly because some of us have direct experience in building these labs. We know how they're plumbed and how to navigate their most common pitfalls.

But it's also because new team members are trained up to use these labs. This means every staff member has the expertise necessary to provision and troubleshoot these educational environments.

The importance of backstage expertise can't be overstated. Disruption to a VMware lab means disruption to learning – something that costs both teachers and students money. With experts like us at the tiller, you know you're in safe waters all the way.

What is VEDP?

Formerly VATC, VEDP stands for "VMware Education Delivery Partner". These are authorised third-party organisations that provide official VMware training courses and certification programmes for cloud professionals.

These partners are certified to deliver training that covers the whole VMware stack. This covers VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere, vSAN and NSX.

What courses do you host labs for?

We host labs for the full range of VEDP courses. You can explore the complete list in our course catalogue.

What is a VMware lab?

A VMware lab is a browser-based virtualised environment that allows users and learners to work with VMware products such as vSphere, VCF and NSX. They're often used as part of VMware training courses, providing hands-on training in a low-risk environment with ample backstage technical support.

Are you looking for high-performance lab hosting services for VEDP courses? Don't hesitate to get in touch with Ascend Cloud Solutions to discuss your needs in detail.

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