Hey All,

Great news guys, I have now got online labs available for you.

Advantages of having this lab is

1. No cost of buying an expensive server and noisy servers.
2. Save Electricity cost.
3. Save time on setting up and troubleshooting. start learning immidately.

What’s included? you will get access to your own cluster with 2 EXS hosts you can connect to the vCenter directly and start practising without wasting any time. I have seen people who can’t setup a lab loose interest very soon, and if you struggle to get the lab running that can put you off too. This is the idea behind my Online lab this lets you start practising without wasting time troubleshooting issues.

I have had a lot of request in the past few months especially after I started the sessions for vSpehre 7 about how to get access to labs.

I would like to keep this for the people who are very interested in learning however they do not have a setup at home to create a home lab. with my experience, we need at least 32 GB of memory to be able to configure a proper vSphere 7 lab.

To give you an idea this is the minimal resources you will need to give to setup a decent lab to practice.

12 GB Memory for vCenter Server

4 GB at least for ESX1

4 GB at least for ESX2

4 GB for Windows AD server ( optional if you don’t want to use DNS) alternate you can use a Linux DNS server too.

8 GB for the setup of shared storage, in my lab I have used FreeNAS to set up shared storage.

So it all adds up to 32 GB, If you don’t have this kind of hardware and you really want to practice, do reach out to me and I might be able to offer you some discount for early birds trying out my virtual datacenter for a small price.

The price is only to cover the cost of the expensive hardware I have put in and the running electricity cost and internet charges. if you want to discuss this you can reach out to me on my email ibrahim@agileops.co.uk

So, you may ask how do I get the access?

Very simple you will just use Microsoft Remote Desktop client from your laptop or computer.

you will get an RDP login to enter the domain name to connect to my label which is agileops.loginto.me. hang on before that you need to contact me so that I can set up your account once I have sent you the details for login you are good to go. you will have full access to your own ESXi and vCetner to practice and learn on your own time. I will send an email with all the instructions on how to login and access the environment.

as you can see the setup below, you can connect to an RDP JUMP server which will allow you to use single sign-on to connect tot he vCenter Environment, it will be ready to use form the point you login.

How to Pay and when will I get access?

first, before you book email me and let me know which lab you need as there are only limited labs I can offer do not pay first.

You can pay after I have confirmed to you select what pass you want I have created three options for you too select.

1. An online Day pass is for 24, and we have two choices RTU which is Ready to Use or BIY Build it yourself.
2. Online Week Pass is for one whole week offering two choices RTU which is Ready to Use or BIY Build it yourself.
3. Online Month pass is for one whole month offering two choices RTU which is Ready to Use or BIY Build it yourself.

you can use paypay to pay easily don’t forgot to mention the lab name as the lab will be created for the specific option. https://paypal.me/agileops

I have also included CISCO UCS Platform Emulator for anyone who wants to learn Cisco Unified Computing system

You can follow one of the YouTube Session to practice one topic or try and configure everything from scratch. This is the best way to learn and I have a very reasonable price for each lab.

If you like it share it with others so that they can benefit it.

Hey all I am in a process of upgrading my existing lab which had been running for a while now. I decided to move to commodity hardware partly to show that we can run a decent lab using traditional hardware.

The new virtual lab will be using Dell desktop Optiplex 7010.

Configuration/ BOM

intel i7 with 3.4 GHz – 8 cores

32 GB RAM – 4 times 8GB 1600 Bus speed

2 TB HDD

100 GB SSD for vSAN LAB setup

Bill of material I paid just under 400£ for this desktop which is a lot less pricey when compare to other options like super micros systems.