What to look for in a Broadcom lab hosting provider

If you're a VMware Education Delivery Partner (VEDP), there are multiple things to consider before letting learners log in.

You need instructors. You need courses. You need enrolment procedures, assessment procedures and feedback procedures.

None of this amounts to much, however, without high-quality underlying infrastructure that hosts your labs.

After all, the training itself is only possible because of these backstage processes. Undergoing a virtual online training course with a suboptimal lab is like taking university lectures in a roofless building. Sure, some of the learners will doggedly get the grades, but many will drop out and leave you a stinging review.

So, how do you know which lab hosting provider to choose? What separates the high-performing wheat from the glitchy, draggy, disruptive chaff?

There are three main things to look for: consistency, reliability and quality. In practice, these three principal qualities are made possible by a wide variety of smaller overlapping processes.

Here are 10 to look out for when choosing a Broadcom lab hosting provider.

1. VMware partner status

First and foremost, you should make sure you choose a provider that's a Broadcom partner or part of the VMware Cloud Service Partner programme.

Using an authorised provider ensures you get continued access to supported licensing, updates and services. This is vital if you want your course offerings to be reliable. Waiting for updates or licence renewals only causes disruption for learners and instructors.

2. Ready-to-use labs

Consistency and reliability matter for one key reason: they keep the learner engaged.

Learning is like any other long-term investment. The smoother it goes, the happier you are. No one likes an intellectual challenge made more taxing by logistical problems.

One way to ensure the spotlight is on learning, not infrastructural concerns, is to work with a Broadcom lab hosting provider that offers ready-to-use labs, whether on VCF, vSphere, vSAN or another piece of VMware software.

3. Fast provisioning

Related to the above is the need for fast provisioning. This is of great importance both for meeting learner expectations and when it's time to scale up your offerings.

The cornerstone of fast provisioning is being able to set up labs in minutes. Other signifiers include a self-service portal, one-click deployment and automatic clean-ups after lab sessions.

These technical strengths all contribute to a learning environment that helps learners reach their objectives without unnecessary obstacles.

4. Recoverability

It's one of the key selling points of virtual training: the ability of learners to experiment safely without breaking or even touching live production environments.

To make this happen, you need a lab hosting provider with a support team on hand that can get you back on track quickly – not just to reset and start over.

This enables learners to experiment, reset and take notes again and again until they've absorbed the knowledge they require.

5. Resource flexibility

Every course provider needs to be able to scale. You don't want to keep learners waiting – or, still worse, turn them away – because you don't have the resources to speedily enrol and accommodate them.

This is especially important in the context of resource-intensive VMware lab learning. You'll need a lab hosting provider that can scale CPU, RAM, storage and multiple nested ESXi hosts.

This will increase your chances of meeting learner expectations even when there's a sudden or unexpected spike in demand.

6. Network flexibility

When enrolling for a VMware lab, learners expect realistic enterprise scenarios. This can't be achieved without a high level of network flexibility.

This, in turn, is hard to achieve without a lab hosting provider that offers multiple VLANs, NSX networking, VPN connectivity, isolated environments, custom DNS and custom DHCP.

7. Global accessibility

Why choose online labs over physical, classroom-based learning? There are multiple answers to the question, but one of the most common is global accessibility.

With virtual sandbox labs, learners can access courses from anywhere in the world – if, that is, the lab hosting provider has the resources to make it happen.

This means browser-based access, HTML5 consoles, low-latency data centres and, of course, multi-region availability. Without these, you'll dramatically limit the number of learners you can enrol.

8. Security

You don't need us to tell you the importance of security for every aspect of online education. But your lab hosting provider also has an important role to play.

After all, any compromise to the underlying infrastructure is a compromise to the courses you deliver.

That's why you should work with a lab hosting provider that offers tenant isolation, role-based access permissions, multi-factor authentication (MFA), audit logging, data encryption and automated lab expiration.

This doesn't just keep learners safe – it also protects your reputation.

9. Support quality

There are many things you can do to ensure virtual labs are frictionless experiences for learners. But if there's a problem with the hosting service, you need to be confident it can be fixed in seconds – not put off while learners wait.

This is why the support quality of lab hosting providers is so crucial to learner satisfaction. You need troubleshooters on hand to fix glitches in real time. This is a key contributor to the consistency and reliability of your educational offerings as well as the level of learner satisfaction.

Above all, you need 24/7 support availability from VMware-certified engineers with response SLAs. The alternative is to keep learners and instructors waiting for the firefighters to come – a waste of their time and your money.

10. Performance monitoring

Last but not least, you need a lab hosting provider that monitors lab performance. This will likely include resource usage dashboards, performance metrics, health monitoring, capacity alerts and cost reporting. All these can help ensure your labs have the capacity and performance they need to run reliably, while highlighting potential issues before they affect learners or instructors.

Are you looking for highly reliable, highly secure lab hosting services for VEDP courses? Get in touch with Ascend Cloud Solutions to speak directly to our experts, or explore our course catalogue online.

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