EMC World 2014 Hands on Labs (vLab)–What to Expect

I unfortunately won’t be making it to EMC World (#EMCWorld) this year (2014) due to my recent “life adventure”, though for the past 3 years I have been part of a team, including EMC business units, who have been responsible for pulling together the EMC World Hands on Labs (HOL) experience.  This has always proven to be an exciting, at times challenging, though ultimately a rewarding experience.  Virtualizing the various hardware appliances in EMC’s portfolio and then wrapping a quality, educational and value-add lab scenario around it is something of an art-form to do correctly so as to offer attendees the best possible experience. 

The EMC vLab team (#EMCvLab) along with the various EMC business units look to have created another awesome HOL experience for those attendees wanting to get their hands on some of the latest EMC and partner products.  In past years we have offered 200 seats where attendees can come, sit down and choose from a list of 30+ labs and then work through the lab at their own pace, with product experts on hand to answer any questions or fix any issues they may encounter.  This year things are being done a little bit differently to further enhance the attendee’s HOL experience, for more details on this read on.  But first…

Transforming an empty space…

I always find the building out of the HOL area at EMC World, and VMworld for that matter, an amazing transformation to observe.  In the matter of hours an empty conference area goes from this…

… to this, a fully operational battlestation HOL environment.  It’s always great to see all the months of planning and hard work coming to completion and the doors to the EMC World HOL opening for the first time:

What’s New? Self-Paced & Instructor Led Lab Sessions

As with every EMC World HOL experience we try and do something new and exciting for the attendees.  So this year along with the usual self-paced labs (150 seats with 33 labs to choose from) the EMC vLab team have also formed 13 instructor led guided labs which will run concurrently alongside the self-paced labs.  All of which can be found in the same area on the show floor.  These guided lab sessions cover exciting products such as VNX2, ViPR, Isilon, ScaleIO, Cloud Foundry and Project Nile to name a few, and are led by EMC Education Services.  Below is a complete list of these exciting guide led labs – for more information and a full description of each lab visit the EMC World scheduler site here.

Instructor Led Labs

• Deploying Hadoop With EMC Isilon & VMware (2 hours)
• EMC Storage Resource Management Suite: Visualize, Analyze, Optimize Storage Resources (1 hour)
• EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage & Project Nile: A Day In The Life Of A Storage Administrator (1 hour)
• Enable True Storage-as-a-Service To Deliver Cloud Scale Services With EMC ViPR & Project Nile (1 hour)
• Enterprise Private Cloud: Learn How To Simplify, Manage & Deploy Your Private Cloud With EMC & VMware (1 hour)
• Introduction To EMC ScaleIO (2 hours)
• Performance Analyzer For The VMAX Family (1 hour)
• Pivotal Cloud Foundry (1 hour)
• RecoverPoint: Discover Operational Recovery & Disaster Recovery In A Multi-Site Environment (2 hours)
• Continuum: Getting More With EMC Data Protection & Availability (1 hour)
• Unisphere Analyzer For VNX2 (2 hours)
• VMware vSphere Integration With VNX2 (2 hours)
• VPLEX Virtual Edition: Continuous Availability Delivered To Your Geographically Dispersed ESXi Environments (1 hour)

Self-Paced Labs

Of course, the self-paced labs shouldn’t be left out – far from it. Below is a full list of all 33 awesome self-paced labs.  Quite a few I think you’ll agree, full description details can be found here:

• Data Protection Considering Hybrid Clouds & The Software-Defined Data Center For Private & Public Cloud Providers
• Deploying Hadoop With EMC Isilon & VMware
• EMC AppSync: Simplified Repurposing & Disaster Recovery For VMware & SQL Server Environments
• EMC Integration With SAP LVM
• EMC Service Assurance Suite: Manage Virtualized & Cloud Environments
• EMC Storage Resource Management Suite: Visualize, Analyze, Optimize Storage Resources
• EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage & Project Nile: A Day In The Life Of A Storage Administrator
• Enable True Storage-as-a-Service To Deliver Cloud Scale Services With EMC ViPR & Project Nile
• Enterprise Private Cloud: Learn How To Simplify, Manage & Deploy Your Private Cloud With EMC & VMware
• Extending Backup & Recovery Control To Cloud Administrators
• Extending Backup & Recovery Control To Mission Critical Application Administrators
• Infrastructure-As-A-Service Made Easy With VSPEX
• Introduction To EMC ScaleIO
• Introduction To The VMAX Family
• Isilon Cluster Setup, Configuration & Management Simplicity
• Isilon Enterprise Ready With OneFS 7.1 Enhancements
• MetroPoint Topology: Enhanced 3-Site Protection With VPLEX Metro & RecoverPoint
• Performance Analyzer For The VMAX Family
• Pivotal Cloud Foundry
• Pivotal HD Big Data Analytics
• RecoverPoint: Discover Operational Recovery & Disaster Recovery In A Multi-Site Environment
• Taking Backup & Archiving To New Heights With EMC Data Domain
• Test Drive Syncplicity: Beauty & Brains To Solve Your Enterprise-Grade File Sync & Share Problems
• The Data Protection Continuum: Getting More With EMC Data Protection & Availability
• Unified Approach To Enterprise Archiving
• Unisphere Analyzer For VNX2
• VCE Vision Intelligent Operations
• VMware vSphere Integration With VNX2
• VNX2 Storage Management & Administration
• VNX2 Storage Monitoring For Your Business Needs
• VNXe Unisphere Management
• VPLEX: Introduction To VPLEX & VPLEX Integrated Array Services (VIAS)
• VPLEX Virtual Edition: Continuous Availability Delivered To Your Geographically Dispersed ESXi Environments

Not attending EMC World 2014 but want to try out any of these labs?

If you’re not attending EMC World this year and are an EMC Partner or employee then you’ll be able to access these labs iva the EMC vLab portal after May 14th 2014.  However if you’re not an EMC partner or employee and  would like to get some hands-on time with one or more of these labs then speak to your local EMC sales rep. and they able to get you temporary access to the labs.  If not for what ever reason, then drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do.

If you are at EMC World 2014 then I highly recommend that you pencil out some time in your calendar this week to go and sit a few labs, it’ll be well worth your time.