As a Microsoft Certified Trainer, I am authorized to teach the Microsoft Official Curriculum in our training centers, at customer sites and over the internet. The MOC, as it’s called, has hands-on lab work which is delivered using Virtual Machines (VM’s) using Microsoft’s Virtual PC or Virtual Server. This is a good strategy which means that you can run the course labs on virtually any machine. Sorry…practically any machine…
In the good old days of teaching Microsoft courses, a training partner had to setup the instructor and student machines individually which was a laborious and error prone process. Then technology such as Norton’s Ghost made the process a lot simpler by being able to broadcast a disk image across a classroom in a matter of minutes. Of course, if you were using Active Directory, you needed to “sysprep” the student image so that each machine would get a unique SID (Security ID). Or you could use sysinternals freeware newsid.exe. But if you were teaching a course that required multiple roles you needed to assign those roles to the students. For instance, in an Exchange class there might be roles for a Front-End Server, a Back-End Server or an Outlook client. The student who got the Outlook client role was never happy. Not much interesting happening on the client. If things went wrong, there were always fingers pointing in many directions. Each student was only seeing part of the solution. Not ideal.
Enter VMWare. VMWare captured the imagination of the IT marketplace by allowing, through its software, to run multiple operating systems on the same physical machine. These “guest” operating systems would be called “Virtual Machines” or VM’s. This meant that in the Exchange class, each student could now play all the roles on the same machine. If things went wrong, it was now up to the student to fix the problem and practice their troubleshooting skills. No more finger pointing and a better educational experience. The only drawback is memory allocation. Each Virtual Machine needs its own slice of physical memory so your machines need plenty of RAM.
A company called Connectix also had similar technology, so along came Microsoft, acquired it and started marketing Virtual PC and eventually its more robust version, Virtual Server. Now all Microsoft training takes place using this technology. It means that student machines can all be a generic hardware running Windows XP or similar using Virtualization. Each section of a course can now have a separate VM with a unique setup especially for the lab in question. Multiple VM’s can create a multi-server solution for each student including advanced subjects such as Failover Clustering or Network Load Balancing. Very flexible.
Another drawback, however, is that these VM disk images can be quite large, running into many GigaBytes. If Microsoft decides to have a separate VM for each section of a course, you may be talking about a great deal of storage. In fact, recently we loaded all the VM files for all the courses we teach in our Virtual Classroom environment over the internet and it was close to a terabyte in size. However, I recently bought an Acomdata terabyte USB drive for less than $150. So you can easily copy the appropriate VM files onto the student machines via USB. But what if you wanted to bypass this copy and actually run the Virtual Machines directly from the external drive using USB 2.0?. Lo and behold, it works well! But my terabyte disk drive requires its own power source and the last thing I need on the road is another power brick. A colleague of mine, Craig Brown, let me know about Western Digital’s “MyPassport” disk drives. They are small and portable (a little larger than a Blackberry) with a maximum capacity of 500GB and no power brick, for around $130.
Just for yucks, I try to test out the latest SQL Server 2008 images running on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition using Virtual PC on my daughter’s Acer Aspire micro laptop and the My Passport disk drive. Plug and Play. No external power needed (well, for 3 hours anyway). Total hardware cost? Less than $450. And a footprint that would leave room for a drink on an in-flight fold-down table. (Please don’t try this, but you get the picture…)
Now, is it just me or is that amazing? We geeks are easily pleased, I guess.
Cheers
Brian
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