Have a safe and happy Labor Day weekend!

VM's in the Classroom!

Strategies for delivering classes over the last 30 years have changed.  Once upon a time an overhead projector with slides was a requirement that most instructors could not live without.  I can still remember running through an airport on a Friday evening and my bag opened and had 500 slides all over concourse K at O'hare.  Did anybody stop to help?  Let's just say the next time I taught that class, there were shoe prints on some of the slides.  Times change, now we expect a classroom projector we can hook up our laptops to display our presentations.

I have taught many different classes in my career as an instructor.  Learning a new desktop environment or teaching Intro to Unix didn't require too much of a classroom setup.  As I progressed to more complex classes, the need for a client/server setup became a must.  A networking class would require multiple subnets, each of which may have servers like DHCP, DNS, Sendmail, and NIS.  To evenly distribute tasks among the students in the subnet, I would have each of them configure one of the servers and the rest would be clients.  Although I would emphasize to work in teams, if students weren't comfortable with each other, they would independently work on their server or client.  Some would even set up the client before the server was ready, and then ask why stuff wasn't working.  This led to frustration, and usually, the student that needed to know the DNS setup, was the one configuring Sendmail, etc.

The first time I taught a Solaris 10(S-295) class at TechNow, my classroom was set up to run Solaris in a virtual machine (VM).  It wasn't the first time I had run solaris in a VM, I had used both VMware and VirtualBox on my laptop to enable me to run another operating system without having to reinstall or repartition the operating system that was already there, but it was the first time that I was going to use this technology in the classroom.  A little apprehensive at first, I had always taught Solaris on 'Bare Metal' system.  As the class progressed and we got to the NFS lab, it was very apparent that by having a second VM on the same machine running Solaris, one student could do both the client and the server portion of the lab.  No more idle time waiting for another student to finish before you could progress to the next step.  The student was exposed and received hands on experience for the entire setup.

The Solaris class at TechNow was introduced in 2007.  At the time, most training environments I taught in were still in the mode of one function per system.  As VM's have become more mainstream in corporate America, training philosophies have changed.  Do not be surprised when you walk into a TechNow course, that you will be responsible for maintaining multiple VM's.  Whether it is the TN-5145 class (Windows Server 2008 Administrator) where you will configure a Windows 2008 server and windows clients, the L-295 class (Linux Server Admin II) where you will configure multiple servers/clients using CentOS and/or Ubuntu, the S-295 class (Solaris System Admin II) in which the student will configure jumpstart to install a VM from another VM among other things, or even the TN-425 class (Certified Ethical Hacker CEH) where you understand exploits and tools in multiple operating systems, all of these classes use multiple guest operating systems that run in one host operating system. 

Come to TechNow for training, and let us introduce to you or demonstrate the power of virtual machines in the classroom.  See you soon.

Best Regards,
Bill Peterson
TechNow
Corp. Headquarters
(800) 324-2294