What does a training-ready VMware lab look like?

VMware labs must be technically sound, but they also have to be ready to support learning. Find out what a training-ready lab really looks like.



A lot has to happen behind the scenes for a VMware training lab to function effectively. But whatever's happening behind the scenes, the lab has to look and feel good to the user.

From one point of view, a VMware training lab just has to work. But when you break it down, "working" consists of several overlapping and moving parts.

The lab must be accessible. It must be breakable, enabling learners to safely build, break, troubleshoot and rebuild virtual infrastructure without affecting production. It must be performant enough to cope with workloads. And it must be consistent enough not to glitch or drop out mid-session.

It's a lot of responsibility for the provider – especially a provider also busy with course design, HR and other essentials.

That's a key reason why so many course providers choose to outsource infrastructure to a third-party lab hosting service like ours. We take care of the backend, so you can concentrate on course provision.

In this article, we take a closer look at what makes a VMware lab ready for learning to begin.

1. Accessibility

Accessibility in VMware course provision takes several forms. If learning takes place at a particular site, that site has to be accessible. And whether the learning is in-person or remote, the educational materials must be accessible to learners with different needs.

But the lab environment itself must also be accessible. At its most basic, this involves giving each learner the correct account details, permissions and network access.

It also involves provisioning enough lab resources to accommodate every student. VMs, CPU, memory, storage, network capacity – all must be sufficient for learning to begin. And if there are capacity issues, processes must be in place to fix them sooner rather than later.

The lab should be thoroughly tested on the browsers and operating systems that learners will use. Without these preliminary tests, learning can easily be disrupted.

Accessibility also depends on available support. If there's a login issue, say, learners need to know who to turn to for help and trust that the problem will be addressed promptly.

Finally, lab guides and training manuals should be easily accessible to avoid bottlenecks.

2. Frangibility

If something's frangible, it can be broken. In the context of VMware training labs, this means the infrastructure should remain intact while learners safely break isolated and disposable components.

After all, a key benefit of these kinds of learning labs is that learners can repeatedly explore real-life production scenarios in an isolated environment until they become second nature.

VMs can be created, removed and corrupted, network settings changed, software installed and removed, and faults deliberately created.



In virtual networks, learners can intentionally misconfigure switches, VLANs, routing, DNS and firewall rules. And in terms of security, learners can test permissions and role-based access.

This is far from a comprehensive list. But it gives you a sense of what a learner must be able to do in a VMware training lab for the course to be effective.

With these capabilities in place, learners are in the enviable position of being able to repeat real-life scenarios in isolated environments that don't touch production.

Rather than learning on the job and making mistakes that could cause disruptions, learners are ready to put out fires in the safety of their sandbox.

In the worlds of software engineering, digital platforms and AI development, there's a saying:

"Break the lab, not the platform." Without this capacity, learners are short-changed – but to make it happen requires a lot of behind-the-scenes expertise.

3. Performance capability

This is where the backstage expertise really comes into its own. The lab must be performant enough to cope with capacity, handling all the learners and their workloads without disruptive lag or system failure.

This is a multi-faceted affair. Labs need enough physical CPU cores and processing headroom to run all the necessary VMs.

The hypervisor, management services and VMs need sufficient RAM. For learners to boot or snapshot VMs concurrently, you'll need SSD/NVMe storage with sufficient input/output operations per second (IOPS) and low latency.

Network capacity is crucial. There must be enough bandwidth and low enough latency for learners, VMs and administrators.

There's also the question of resource allocation. You need to size for the worst-case scenario. But that doesn't mean a maximalist approach to resource allocation. Instead, you should calculate the right amounts of vCPU, RAM, storage and network resources for VMs and leave headroom.

This relates to another form of planning. Perhaps your course averages 20 learners. You need to work with a lab host that gives each learner the resources they need along with some wiggle-room in case of a spike in class size.

Isolation is key to VMware training labs – after all, these are labs isolated from production environments. Resource controls are required to ensure that learners don't consume each other's resources.

The whole setup needs to be carefully monitored. This involves tracking CPU, memory, disk latency, network usage, datastore capacity and VM performance. Without this proactive monitoring, bottlenecks can appear and affect training sessions.

Last but not least, the training lab must be thoroughly tested before use by learners. This maximises your chances of creating a lab that's consistent, performant and secure.

Sound like a lot? We can help.

How we can help

Here at Ascend Cloud Solutions, we take care of lab hosting so you don't have to. Our lab infrastructure is highly reliable and highly secure, meaning your learners and instructors can experience a frictionless learning environment.

Get in touch with our VMware experts to discuss how a partnership could help you focus on educating, not firefighting. Want to learn more about what we can do? Explore our course catalogue today.