How we spin up 100+ VMware lab environments in minutes

These days, "training" is increasingly synonymous with "virtual training". Employers the world over are turning to online training to upskill the cloud engineers on their teams.

It's easy to see why. Virtual training saves the employer money, using a platform that can be accessed by hundreds of students at once.

Geographical and temporal limits are removed as learners use a browser-based training platform to ingrain deep skills through detailed and repetitive learning-by-doing.

Old-school physical training had an underlying infrastructure: training organisations, premises management, educational material designers, and so on.

In terms of complexity, however, this pales in comparison to the highly specialised, highly technical lab hosting services that underpin virtual sandbox training.

Here at Ascend Cloud Solutions, we harness all our technical expertise to spin up safely isolated VMware lab environments on a highly secure and highly reliable infrastructure.

This involves provisioning substantial resources to each student – and doing that requires state-of-the-art infrastructure.

As well as providing infrastructure, we provide real-time troubleshooting. This means any technical issues that arise during a session are dealt with swiftly and efficiently.

In other words, we keep the wheels turning, enabling learners and instructors alike to make the most of their learning time.

So, how do we do it? Here are five key aspects of our lab hosting services.

1. Dedicated VMware lab infrastructure

In one sense, "spin up" is a misnomer. We don't create ephemeral per-user deployments. Instead, our focus is on creating browser-accessible virtual lab environments for learners and instructors.

Like any foundation, this infrastructure has to be robust. It's designed for high availability, reliability and global delivery, enabling hundreds of learners to use VEDP services simultaneously. This can't be achieved without

substantial resources.

2. Provisioning with substantial resources

The levels of reliability and security that we've mentioned require substantial resource provisioning.

These resources are essential to enable a smooth learning experience for learners – and to create an environment where nested VMware workloads can run.

3. Nested VMware labs

Our focus is often on the infrastructure that underlies VEDP labs – not least because it works as a handy metaphor for our behind-the-scenes structural support.

But our work is focused on nested lab environments as much as it's focused on technical foundations. Students learning to administer software from the VMware product portfolio do so within isolated environments – nested virtualised components running in the larger infrastructure.

4. Pre-built environments

Our lab hosting doesn't involve building labs from scratch. Instead, we provision capacity, assign resources and carry out troubleshooting and maintenance within pre-built environments.

Where tools like Terraform, Kubernetes or cloud-native automation spin up environments on demand, we provision pre-engineered lab templates onto existing infrastructure.

5. Operational support

We live in the age of real-time.

Think back a decade or so. Remember how you had to sit twiddling your thumbs while you waited for technical support to arrive?

With virtual lab environments, this disruptive troubleshooting model has gone the way of Stephenson's Rocket.

VEDP instructors using our lab hosting services have access to a 24/7 support portal – and lab issues are treated as "priority one".

In practice, this means lab issues are resolved in 15 to 30 minutes. That keeps downtime to an absolute minimum and ensures learner continuity as far as possible.

It's important to note, too, that these troubleshooting services aren't solely focused on infrastructure issues. They also include rescuing the environment from student mistakes.

Why are these lab hosting services important?

Training has a range of benefits for cloud professionals and their employers – but only if the training is done well.

Bad, bumpy or disrupted learning has a way of turning learners off. How are you supposed to focus if the browser is lagging or a technical issue makes you put down your proverbial pencil for an hour?

That's where our lab hosting services come into their own. We work tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure a smooth learner experience, prioritising secure and isolated pods, resource provisioning, high availability and equally high reliability.

What is VEDP?

VEDP stands for "VMware Education Delivery Partners". Formerly known as VATC, VEDP is a VMware-authorised training provider covering the whole VMware product portfolio.

Since Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, the product portfolio has been streamlined – and the VEDP course catalogue reflects these changes.

All VEDP courses embody the benefits of virtual learning. As well as geographical and temporal flexibility for employers and learners, it lets learners "break things safely" in a sandbox environment without touching real-life production environments.

This builds their confidence with core skills so they can harness them when required in the real world.

The VEDP syllabus includes courses on VCF, vSphere, Cloud Director, Aria and Tanzu. For a complete list, see our course catalogue.

About us

Ascend Cloud Solution was born in the cloud – and in the VMware cloud at that. Our team is made up of VMware experts with years of experience in cloud migration, cloud consultation and lab provisioning.

This makes us well-placed to deliver reliable, secure, substantially resourced labs for VEDP training courses.

We built our lab platform with our data centre partner and have been delivering labs globally for several years.

Our role is simple: to ensure a smooth learner experience through resource provisioning, troubleshooting and infrastructure maintenance. It's why our lab hosting services are secure, reliable and able to help course instructors bring learning to life.

Explore our VMware course catalogue today, or get in touch to discuss how our hosting services can help you deliver more effective training.

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