Category Archives: Education

Is It Time To Remove the VCP Class Requirement?

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While I was at VMware Partner Exchange, I attended a keynote address. This in and of itself isn’t a big deal. However, one of the bullet points that came up in the keynote slide deck gave me a bit of pause. VMware is chaging some of their VSP and VTSP certifications to be more personal and direct. Being a VCP, this didn’t really impact me a whole lot. But I thought it might be time to tweet out one of my oft-requested changes to the certification program:

Oops. I started getting flooding with mentions. Many were behind me. Still others were vehemently opposed to any changes. They said that dropping the class requirement would devalue the certification. I responded as best I could in many of these cases, but the reply list soon outgrew the words I wanted to write down. After speaking with some people, both officially and unofficially, I figured it was due time I wrote a blog post to cover my thoughts on the matter.

When I took the VMware What’s New class for vSphere 5, I mentioned therein that I thought the requirement for taking a $3,000US class for a $225 test was a bit silly. I myself took and passed the test based on my experience well before I sat the class. Because my previous VCP was on VMware ESX 3 and not on ESX 4, I still had to sit in the What’s New course before my passing score would be accepted. To this day I still consider that a silly requirement.

I now think I understand why VMware does this. Much of the What’s New and Install, Configure, and Manage (ICM) classes are hands-on lab work. VMware has gone to great lengths to build out the infrastructure necessary to allow students to spend their time practicing the lab exercises in the courses. These labs rival all but the CCIE practice lab pods that I’ve seen. That makes the course very useful to all levels of students. The introductory people that have never really touched VMware get to experience it for real instead of just looking at screenshots in a slide deck. The more experienced users that are sitting the class for certification or perhaps to refresh knowledge get to play around on a live system and polish skills.

The problem comes that investment in lab equipment is expensive. When the CCIE Data Center lab specs were released, Jeff Fry calculated the list price of all the proposed equipment and it was staggering. Now think about doing that yourself. With VMware, you’re going to need a robust server and some software. Trial versions can be used to some degree, but to truly practice advanced features (like storage vMotion or tiering) you’re going to need a full setup. That’s a bit out of reach for most users. VMware addressed this issue by creating their own labs. The user gets access to the labs for the cost of the ICM or What’s New class.

How is VMware recovering the costs of the labs? By charging for the course. Yes, training classes aren’t cheap. You have to rent a room and pay for expenses for your instructor and even catering and food depending on the training center. But $3,000US is a bit much for ICM and What’s New. VMware is using those classes to recover the costs of the lab development and operation. In order to be sure that the costs are recovered in the most timely manner, the metrics need to make sense for class attendance. Given the chance, many test takers won’t go to the training class. They’d rather study from online material like the PDFs on VMware’s site or use less expensive training options like TrainSignal. Faced with the possiblity that students may elect to forego the expensive labs, VMware did what they had to so to ensure the labs would get used, and therefore the metrics worked out in their favor – they required the course (and labs) in order to be certified.

For those that say that not taking the class devalues the cert, ask yourself one question. Why does VMware only require the class for new VCPs? Why are VCPs in good standing allowed to take the test with no class requirement and get certified on a new version? If all the value is in the class, then all VCPs should be required to take a What’s New class before they can get upgraded. If the value is truly in the class, no one should be exempt from taking it. For most VCPs, this is not a pleasant thought. Many that I talked to said, “But I’ve already paid to go to the class. Why should I pay again?” This just speaks to my point that the value isn’t in the class, it’s in the knowledge. Besides VMware Education, who cares where people acquire the knowledge and experience? Isn’t a home lab just as good as the ones that VMware built.

Thanks to some awesome posts from people like Nick Marus and his guide to building an ESXi cluster on a Mac Mini, we can now acquire a small lab for very little out-of-pocket. It won’t be enough to test everything, but it should be enough to cover a lot of situations. What VMware needs to do is offer an alternate certification requirement that takes a home lab into account. While there may be ways to game the system, you could require a VMware employee or certified instructor or VCP to sign off on the lab equipment before it will be blessed for the alternate requirement. That should keep it above board for those that want to avoid the class and build their own lab for testing.

The other option would be to offer a more “entry level” certification with a less expensive class requirement that would allow people to get their foot in the door without breaking the bank. Most people see the VCP as the first step in getting VMware certified. Many VMware rock stars can’t get employed in larger companies because they aren’t VCPs. But they can’t get their VCP because they either can’t pay for the course or their employer won’t pay for it. Maybe by introducing a VMware Certified Administration (VCA) certification and class with a smaller barrier to entry, like a course in the $800-$1000US range, VMware can get a lot of entry level people on board with VMware. Then, make the VCA an alternate requirement for becoming a VCP. If the student has already shown the dedication to getting their VCA, VMware won’t need to recoup the costs from them.

Tom’s Take

It’s time to end the VCP class requirement in one form or another. I can name five people off the top of my head that are much better at VMware server administration than I am that don’t have a VCP. I have mine, but only because I convinced my boss to pay for the course. Even when I took the What’s New course to upgrade to a VCP5, I had to pull teeth to get into the last course before the deadline. Employers don’t see the return on investment for a $3,000US class, especially if the person that they are going to send already has the knowledge shared in the class. That barrier to entry is causing VMware to lose out on the visbility that having a lot of VCPs can bring. One can only hope that Microsoft and Citrix don’t beat VMware to the punch by offering low-cost training or alternate certification paths. For those just learning or wanting to take a less expensive route, having a Hyper-V certification in a world of commoditized hypervisors would fit the bill nicely. After that, the reasons for sticking with VMware become less and less important.

Cloud and the Death of E-Rate

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Seems today you can’t throw a rock with hitting someone talking about the cloud.  There’s cloud in everything from the data center to my phone to my TV.  With all this cloud talk, you’d be pretty safe to say that cloud has its detractors.  There’s worry about data storage and password security.  There are fears that cloud will cause massive layoffs in IT.  However, I’m here to take a slightly different road with cloud.  I want to talk about how cloud is poised to harm your children’s education and bankrupt one the most important technology advantage programs ever.

Go find your most recent phone bill.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a landline phone or a cell phone bill.  Now, flip to the last page.  You should see a minor line item labeled “Federal Universal Service Fee”.  Just like all other miscellaneous fees, this one goes mostly unnoticed, especially since it’s required on all phone numbers.  All that money that you pay into the Universal Service Fund is administered by the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), a division of the FCC.  USF has four divisions, one of which is the Schools and Libraries Division (SLD).  This portion of the program has a more commonly used name – E-Rate.  E-Rate helps schools and libraries all over the country obtain telecommunications and Internet access.  It accomplishes this by providing a fund that qualifying schools can draw from to help pay for a portion of their services.  Schools can be classified in a range of discount percentages, ranging from as low as 20% all the way up to 90% discount rates.  Those schools only have to pay $.10 on the dollar for their telecommunications services.  Those schools also happen to be the ones most in need of assistance, usually because of things such as rural location or other funding challenges.

E-Rate is divided into two separate pieces – Priority One and Priority Two.  Priority One is for telecommunications service and Internet access.  Priority One pays for phone service for the school and the pipeline to get them on the Internet.  The general rule for Priority One is that it is service-based only.  There usually isn’t any equipment provided by Priority One – at least not equipment owned by the customer.  Back in 1997, the first year of E-Rate, a T1 was considered a very fast Internet Circuit.  Today, most schools are moving past 10Mbit Ethernet circuits and looking to 100Mbit and beyond to satisfy voracious Internet users.  All Priority One requests must be fulfilled before Priority Two requests will begin to be funded.  One USAC starts funding Priority Two, they start at the 90% discount percentage and begin funding requests until the $2.25 billion allocated each year to the program is exhausted.  Priority Two covers Internal Connections and basic maintenance on those connections.  This is where the equipment comes in.  You can request routers, switches, wireless APs, Ethernet cabling, and even servers (provided they meet the requirements of providing some form of Internet access, like e-mail or web servers).  You can’t request PCs or phone handsets.  You can only ask for approved infrastructure pieces.  The idea is that Priority Two facilitates connectivity to Priority One services.  Priority Two allocations vary every year.  Some years they never fund past the 90% mark.  Two years ago, they funded all applicants.  It all depends on how much money is left over after all Priority One requests are satisfied.  There are rules in place to prevent schools from asking for new equipment every year to keep things fair.  Schools can only ask for internal connections two out of any five given years (the 2-of-5 rule).  In the other three years, they must ask for maintenance of that equipment.

There has always been a tug-of-war between what things should be covered under Priority One and Priority Two.  As I said, the general rule is that Priority One is for services only – no equipment.  One of the first things that was discussed was web hosting.  Web servers are covered under Priority Two.  A few years ago, some web hosting providers were able to get their services listed under Priority One.  That meant that schools didn’t have to apply to have their web servers installed under Priority Two.  They could just pay someone to host their website under Priority One and be done with it.  No extra money needed.  This was a real boon for those schools with lower discount percentages.  They didn’t have to hope that USAC would fund down into the 70s or the 60s.  Instead, they could have their website hosted under Priority One with no questions asked.  Remember, Priority One is always funded before Priority Two is even considered.  This fact has lead to many people attempting to get qualifying services setup under Priority One.  E-mail hosting and voice over IP (VoIP) are two that immediately spring to mind.  E-mail hosting goes without saying.  Priority One VoIP is new to the current E-Rate year (Year 15) as an eligible service.  The general idea is that a school can use a VoIP system hosted at a central location from a provider and have it covered as a Priority One service.  This still doesn’t cover handsets for the users, as those are never eligible.  It also doesn’t cover a local voice gateway, something that is very crucial for schools that want to maintain a backup just in case their VoIP connectivity goes down.  However, it does allow the school to have a VoIP phone system funded every year as opposed to hoping that E-Rate will fund low enough to cover it this year.

While I agree that access to more services is a good thing overall, I think we’re starting to see a slippery slope that will lead to trouble very soon.  ISPs and providers are scrambling to get anything and everything they can listed as a Priority One service.  Why stop at phones?  Why not have eligible servers hosted on a cloud platform?  Outsource all the applications you can to a data center far, far away.  If you can get your web, e-mail, and phone systems hosted in the cloud, what’s left to place on site in your school? Basic connectivity to those services, perhaps.  We still need switches and routers and access points to enable our connectivity to those far away services.  Except…the money.  Since Priority One always gets funded, everything that gets shoveled into Priority One takes money that could be used in Priority Two for infrastructure.  Schools that may never get funded at 25% will have their e-mail hosting paid for, while a 90% school that could really use APs to connect a mobile lab may get left out even though they have a critical need.  Making things Priority One just for the sake of getting them funded doesn’t really help when the budget for the program is capped from the beginning.  It’s already happening this year.  E-Rate Year 15 will only fund down to 90% for Priority Two.  That’s only because there was a carry over from last year.  Otherwise, USAC was seriously considering not funding Priority Two at all this year.  No internal connections.  No basic maintenance.  Find your own way schools.  Priority One is eating up the fund with all the new cloud services being considered, let alone with the huge increase in faster Internet circuits needed to access all these cloud services.  Network World recently had a report saying that schools need 100Mbps circuits.  Guess where the money to pay for those upgrades is going to come from?  Yep, E-Rate Priority One.  At least, until the money runs out because server hosting is a qualifying service this year.

Most of the schools that get E-Rate funding for Priority Two wouldn’t be able to pay for infrastructure services otherwise.  Unlike large school districts, these in-need schools may be forced to choose between adding a switch to connect a lab and adding another AP to cover a classroom.  Every penny counts, even when you consider they may only be paying 10-12% of the price in the first place.  If Priority One services eat up all the funding before we get to Priority Two, it may not matter a whole lot to those 90% schools.  They may not have the infrastructure in place to access the cloud.  Instead, they’ll limp along with a T1 or a 10Mbps circuit, hoping that one day Priority Two might get funded again.

How do we fix this before cloud becomes the death mask for E-Rate?  We have to ensure that USAC knows that hosting services need to be considered separately from Priority One.  I’m not quite sure how that needs to happen, whether it needs to be a section under Priority Two or if it needs to be something more like Priority One And A Half.  But lumping hosted VoIP in with Internet access simply because there is no on-site equipment isn’t the right solution.  Since a large majority of the schools that qualify for E-Rate are lower elementary schools, it makes sense that they have the best access to the Internet possible, along with good intra-site connectivity.  A gigabit Internet circuit doesn’t amount to much if you are still running on 10Mbps hubs (don’t laugh, it’s happened).  If USAC can’t be convinced that hosted services need to be separated from other Priority One access, maybe it’s time to look at raising the E-Rate cap.  Every year, the amount of requests for E-Rate is more than triple the funding commitment.  That’s a lot of paperwork.  The $2.25 billion allocation set forth in 1997 may have been a lot back then, but looking at the number of schools applying today, it’s just a drop in the bucket.  E-Rate isn’t the only component of USF, and any kind of increase in funding will likely come from an increase in the USF fees that everyone pays.  That’s akin to raising taxes, which is always a hot button issue.  The program itself has even come under fire both in the past and in recent years due to mismanagement and fraud.  I don’t have any concrete answers on how to fix this problem, but I sincerely hope that bringing it to light helps shed some light on the way that schools get their technology needs addressed.  I also hope that it makes people take a hard look at the cloud services being proposed for inclusion in E-Rate and think twice about taking an extra bucket of water from the well.  After all, the well will run dry sooner or later.  Then everyone goes thirsty.

Disclaimer

I am employed by a VAR that focuses on providing Priority Two E-Rate services for schools.  The analysis and opinions expressed in this article do not represent the position of my employer and are my thoughts and conclusions alone.

Mental Case – In a Flash(card)

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You’ve probably noticed that I spend a lot of my time studying for things.  Seems like I’ve always been reading things or memorizing arcane formulae for one reason or another.  In the past, I have relied upon a large number of methods for this purpose.  However, I keep coming back to the tried-and-true flash card.  To me, it’s the most basic form of learning.  A question on the front and an answer on the back is all you need to drill a fact into your head.  As I started studying for my CCIE lab exam, this was the route that I chose to go down when I wanted to learn some of the more difficult features, like BGP supress maps or NTP peer configurations.  It was a pain to hand write all that info out on my cards.  Sometimes it didn’t all fit.  Other times, I couldn’t read my own writing.  I wondered if there was a better solution.

Cue my friend Greg Ferro and his post about a program called Mental Case.  Mental Case, from Mental Faculty, is a program designed to let you create your own flashcards.  The main program runs on a Mac computer and allows you to create libraries of flash cards.  There are a lot of good example sets when you first launch the app for things like languages.  But, as you go through some of the other examples, you can see the power that Mental Case can give you above and beyond a simple 3″x5″ flash card.  For one thing, you can use pictures in your flash cards.  This is handy if you are trying to learn about art or landmarks, for instance.  You could also use it as a quick quiz about Cisco Visio shapes or wireless antenna types.  This is a great way to study things more advanced than just simple text.

Once you dig into Mental Case, though, you can see some of the things that separate it from traditional pen-and-paper.  While it might be handy to have a few flash cards in your pocket to take out and study when you’re in line at the DMV, more often than not you tend to forget about them.  Mental Case can setup a schedule for you to study.  It will pop up and tell you that it’s time to do some work.  That’s great as a constant reminder of what you need to learn.  Another nice feature is the learning feature.  If you have ever used flash cards, you probably know that after a while, you tend to know about 80% of them cold with little effort.  However, there are about 20% that kind of float in the middle of the pack and just get skipped past without much reinforcement.  They kind of get lost in the shuffle, so to speak.  With Mental Case, those questions which you get wrong more often get shuffled to the front, where your attention span is more focused.  Mental Case learns the best ways to make you learn best.  You can also set Mental Case to shuffle or even reverse the card deck to keep you on your toes.

When you couple all of these features with the fact that there is a Mental Case IOS client as well as a desktop version, your study efficiency goes through the roof.  Now, rather than only being able to study your flash cards when you are at your desk, you can take them with you everywhere.  When you consider that most people today spend an awful lot of time staring at their iPhones and iPads, it’s nice to know that you can pull up a set of flash cards from your mobile device and go to town at a moment’s notice, like in the line at the DMV.  In fact, that’s how I got started with Mental Case.  I downloaded the IOS app and started firing out the flash cards for things like changing RIP timers and configuring SSM.  However, the main Mental Case app only runs on Mac.  At the time, I didn’t have a Mac?  How did I do it?  Well, Mental Case seems to have thought of everything.  While the IOS app works best in concert with the Mac app, you can also create flash cards on other sites, like FlashcardExchange and Quizzlet.  You can create decks and make them publicly available for everyone, or just share them among your friends.  You do have to make the deck public long enough to download to Mental Case IOS, but it can be protected again afterwards if you are studying information that shouldn’t be shared with the rest of the world.  Note, though, that the IOS version of the software is a little more basic than the one on the Mac.  It doesn’t support wacky text formatting or the ability to do multiple choice quizzes.  Also, cards that are created with more than two “sides” (Mental Case calls them facets) will only display properly in slideshow mode.  But, if you think of the IOS client as a replacement for the stack of 10,000 flash cards you might already be carrying in your backpack or pocket the limitations aren’t that severe after all.

The latest version of Mental Case now has the option to share content between Macs via iCloud.  This will allow you to keep your deck synced between your different computers.  You still have to sync the cards between your Mac and your IOS device via Wi-Fi.  You can share at shorter ranges over Bluetooth.  You can also create collection of cards known as a Study Archive and place them in a central location, like Dropbox for instance. This wasn’t a feature when I was using Mental Case full time, but I like the idea of being able to keep my cards in one place all the time.

Mental Case is running a special on their software for the next few days.  Normally, the Mac version costs $29.99.  That’s worth every penny if you spend time studying.  However, for the next few days, it’s only $9.99.  This is a steal for such a powerful study program.  The IOS app is also on sale.  Normally $4.99, it’s just $2.99.  Alone the IOS app is a great resource.  Paired with its bigger brother, this is a no-brainer.  Run out and grab these two programs and spend more time studying your facts and figures efficiently and less time creating them.  If you’d like to learn more about Mental Case from Mental Faculty, you can check out their webiste at http://www.mentalcaseapp.com.

Disclaimer

I am a Mental Case IOS user.  I have used the demo version of the Mental Case Mac app.  Mental Case has not contacted me about this review, and no promotional consideration was given.  I’m just a really big fan of the app and wanted to tell people about it.

Networking Is Not Trivia(l)

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Fun fact: my friends and family have banned me from playing Trivial Pursuit.  I played the Genus 4 edition in college so much that I practically memorized the card deck.  I can’t play the Star Wars version or any other licensed set.  I chalk a lot of this up to the fact that my mind seems to be wired for trivia.  For whatever reason, pointless facts stick in my head like glue.  I knew what an aglet was before Phinneas & Ferb.  My head is filled with random statistics and anecdotes about subjects no one cares about.  I’ve been accused in the past of reading encyclopedias in my spare time.  Amusingly enough, I do tend to consume articles on Wikipedia quite often.  All of this lead me to picking a career in computers.

Information Technology is filled with all kinds of interesting trivia.  Whether it’s knowing that Admiral Grace Hopper coined the term “bug” or remembering that the default OSPF reference bandwidth is 100 Mb, there are thousands of informational nuggets laying around, waiting to be discovered and cataloged away for a rainy day.  With my love of learning mindless minutia, it comes as no surprise that I tend to devour all kinds of information related to computing.  After a while I started to realize that simply amassing all of this information doesn’t do any good for anyone.  Simply remembering that EIGRP bandwidth values are multiplied by 256 doesn’t do any good without a bigger picture of realizing it’s for backwards compatibility with IGRP.  The individual facts themselves are useless without context and application.

I tried to learn how to play the guitar many years ago.  I went out and got a starter acoustic guitar and a book of chords and spent many diligent hours practicing the proper fingering to make something other than noise.  I was getting fairly good at producing chords without a second thought.  It kind of started falling apart when I tried to play my first song, though.  While I was good at making the individual notes, when it came time to string them together into something that sounded like a song I wasn’t quite up to snuff.  In much the same way, being an effective IT professional is more than just knowing a whole bunch of stuff.  It’s finding a way to take all that knowledge and apply it somehow.  You need to find a way to take all those little random bits of trivia and learn to apply them to problems to fix things efficiently.  People that depend on IT don’t really care what the multicast address for RIPv2 updates is.  What they want is a stable routing table when they have some sort of access list blocking traffic.  It’s up to us to make a song out of all the network chords we’ve learned.

It’s important to know all of those bits of trivia in the long run.  They come in handy for things like tests or cocktail party anecdotes.  However, you need to be sure to treat them like building blocks.  Take what you need to form a bigger picture.  You won’t become bogged down in the details of deciding what parts to implement based on sheer knowledge alone.  Instead, you can build a successful strategy.  Think of the idea of the gestalt - things are often greater than the sum of their parts.  That’s how you should look at IT-related facts.

Tom’s Take

I’m never going to stop learning trivia.  It’s as ingrained into my personality as snark and sarcasm.  However, if I’m going to find a way to make money off of all that trivia, I need to be sure to remember that factoids are useless without application.  I must always keep in mind that solutions are key to decision makers.  After all, the snark and sarcasm aren’t likely to amount to much of career.  At least not in networking.

More Technical Presentation Tips

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As an engineer for a Value-Added Reseller (VAR) as well as a frequent Tech Field Day delegate and technical presenter, I spend a lot of my time listening to presentations.  I often find myself critiquing them for things like speaker delivery and content.  I feel that it’s my duty to share some of my thoughts on presenting and presentation structure, especially when you choose to talk to a group of technical people.  I’ve already talked about some presentation tips before, so what follows are a couple of new things that I’ve been thinking about for the last year or so.

Time Is Not On Your Side

One of the biggest concerns that I’ve seen with technical presentations as of late is the time issue.  People are typically given a one or two hour presentation slot depending on the event I am attending or presenting at.  The presenter then proceeds to fill the entire time with slide decks and lecture.  Every minute of the presentation is accounted for by a bullet point or a fancy animated slide.  Should someone disrupt the flow of the presenter’s zen with a question or a request for clarification, they are met either with a curt answer or a request to hold all questions until the end of the session.  After the end of the presentation, there is usually very little time for Q&A.

Nowhere was this more apparent to me than at the recent Network Field Day 3.  We managed to gather a great group of individuals once again to listen to industry experts talk to us about great new technologies.  However, for the first time that I can remember, we had a group that was willing to start peppering away with questions not even five minutes into the presentation.  Between Ivan Pepelnjak (@ioshints) and Marko Milivojevic (@icemarkom), there were some very good back-and-forth discussions going on.  I love these kinds of discussions.  They really show how people can take a point and launch from it into a rabbit hole of technical brilliance.  The problem with these discussions come when you have the aforementioned presenters that have filled every minute with a slide.  There’s no room to freestyle and talk about things.  Occasionally, you have companies like Metageek come along and do something totally off the wall.  They want to listen as much as they want to present.  At Wireless Field Day 2, Ryan and Trent spent quite a bit of time talking to the delegates and getting feedback.  I’d say the last twenty minutes of their presentation was spent posing questions rather than answering them.  I found this refreshing.  So refreshing, in fact, that my presentation over cloud computing not a month later got slashed from it’s allotted hour of time down to around 45-50 minutes.  Why?  I wanted to get good feedback from my audience.  I wanted to field questions as they came in and not worry about running out of time to get to my last slide.  I wanted to be sure that my presentation involved the audience as much as possible.  I think that’s a key the needs to be taken forward for presenters.  Don’t look at your time slot as a container to fill to the brim with your own ideas.  Instead, take a cue from the coffee bars of the world and pour your slot almost full.  Leave some room for questions and discussion, which are just like the sweetener and cream I pour in my coffee.  Aim for 75-80% of your time slot for presentation.  The rest should be for your audience.  Even if you don’t get a lot of questions about your presentation, at least the people will be happy that they got out fifteen minutes early and they don’t have to rush to their next session.  Either way, your audience will love you.

Live By The Demo, Die By The Demo

Oh, the demo.  How I love thee.  No boring slide deck.  No relentless bullet points.  All the joy of seeing something work in real life.  But, at the same time I hate the demo.  Too much chance for failure.  Too easy for things to go off the rails and result in a wandering audience.  How then do we reconcile the good things about a demo with all the possible downsides?

The key to giving a good demo is to make it flow.  Come up with a script for your tour that moves the viewers seamlessly from one area to the next.  It should feel connected and coherent.  You should leave some time for improvisation in case your audience finds an area where they would like to spend some more time focusing.  However, these rabbit holes are the first sign that the demo pitfalls are coming soon.  It’s all too easy to waste time talking about a specific feature and lose sight of the big picture.  When that happens, you get lots of sidebar conversations between your audience.  When the people you are talking to spend more time talking to each other, you’ve lost control.  You need to find a way to bring things back to you.  It’s also important to note that technical people hate watching progress bars and incrementing counters.  If your demo is going to require time to load a program or push out a firmware, consider kicking it off early in your presentation and then talking more about a specific feature or fielding questions while it goes on in the background.  Infineta did this at Network Field Day 3.  Rather than let us watch the couple of hundred gigabytes of traffic flooding across a boring screen, they instead kicked off the demo and let it run in the background while they melted our brains with algorithm math.  When we had been beaten into submission by formulae, we flipped back over to see the results of the live demo.  All the benefits of a real walkthrough without any wasted time.

Tom’s Take

There’s no such thing as a perfect presentation.  It’s goal that we all strive for but can never really accomplish.  That’s not to say we as presenters can’t give it our best shot.  I’m not saying these tips will apply to you.  In fact, a large portion of the presentations that I do either don’t involve a demo or don’t have a place for one.  They key is to recognize that a live (or simulcasted) audience isn’t a group of mindless drones that will absorb your every word without question.  You should do your best to involve and include them at every step of the way.  When the audience feels they have a choice in the content and direction, they’ll be more involved and happier in the end.

Partly Cloudy – A Hallmark Presentation

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One of the joys of working for an education-focused VAR is that I get to give technical presentations.  More often than not, I try to get a presentation slot at the Oklahoma Technology Association annual conference.  I did one last year over IPv6 to a packed house…of six people.  This year, I jumped at the chance to grab a slot and talk about something new and different.

The Cloud.

Yes, I figured it was about time to teach the people in education about some of the basics behind cloud.  When the call for presentations came out, I registered almost immediately.  This year, I had 12 months worth of analysis and experience at Tech Field Day to drive me in my presentation preparations.  The first think I knew I needed to do was come up with a catchy title.  People get numbed to the descriptive, SEO-friendly titles that get put on conference agendas.  As you can tell from the titles of my blog posts, I want something that’s going to pop.  I decided to sort of theme my presentation after a weather report.   Therefore, calling it “Partly Cloudy” seemed like a no-brainer.  I added “Forecast For Your Technology Future” as a subtitle to ensure that people didn’t think I was talking strictly about meteorology.  I spent a bit of time laying out slides and putting some thoughts down.  I hate when people read their bullet points from a slide deck, so I use mine more as discussion points.  They serve as a way to keep me on track and help focus me on what I want to say to my audience.  I also decided to do something fun for the audience.  I shamelessly stole this idea from Cisco Press author Tim Szigeti.  Tim wrote a very good guide to QoS and when he gives a presentation at Cisco Live, he gives away a copy of said book to the first person to ask a question during his presentation.  I loved the idea and wanted to do something similar.  However, I’m not an author.  I wracked my brain trying to come up with a good idea.  That was where I came up with the idea of using an umbrella as a prop.  You’ll see why in just a minute.

When I got to the room to do my presentation, I was astonished.  There were almost 90 people in the audience!  I got a little jittery from realizing how many people were there, especially the ones I didn’t know.  I got everything setup and started my video camera so I could go back after the fact and not only post about it on my blog, but have a reference for what I did right and what I could have done better.  Here’s me:

If you’d like to follow along with my slide deck, you can download the PDF HERE.

Compared to last year, I desperately wanted to avoid using the word “so” as much as I did.  I practiced a lot to try and leave it out as a pause word or a joining word.  If you’ve ever talked to me in real life, you can understand how hard that is for me.  Unfortunately, I think I jumped on the word “hallmark” and used it a little more than I should.  Not sure why I did that to be honest.  But as far as things go, it could have been much worse.  One thing that did unnerve me a little was the fact that people started walking out of my presentation about about ten minutes.  Having left a few presentations early in my lifetime, I started thinking in the back of my mind what could be causing people to leave.  Was I boring?  Was the subject matter too elementary?  Did people just hate the sound of my voice?  All in all, about twenty people left before the end, although to be honest if my company hadn’t been giving away a gift card, it might have been higher than that.  I caught up with several of the early departures during the conference and asked them why they decided to bail.  Their response was almost universal and caught me a little off guard – “You were just talking way over our heads.”  I had never even considered that approach.  I’d spent so much time making sure my content touched on many areas of the cloud that I forgot most of my audience doesn’t talk to Christofer Hoff (@Beaker) about cloud regularly.  My audience consisted of people that found out about cloud technology from a Microsoft commercial or on their new iPhone.  These people don’t care about instantiation of vCloud Director instances or vApp deployments.  They’re still amazed they can put a contact on their iPhone and have it show up on their iPad.  That was my failing.  I never want to be the guy that talks down to an audience.  In this case, however, I think I needed to take a step back and ensure my audience was on the same ground I was on when it came to talking about the cloud.  Lesson learned.

There were a number of other little things that bugged me.  I didn’t like standing behind a lectern since I’m usually an animated presenter.  However, the room design forced me to have a microphone.  I was forced to insert a couple of things into my slides.  I’ll let you guess where those were.  Overall though, I was complimented by several audience members and I had lots of people come up to me afterwards and ask me questions about cloud-based software and virtualization.  I think I’m going to do another one of these at the Fall OTA conference focused on something like virtual desktop infrastructure.  This time I’ll have demos.  And fewer weather-related jokes.

Feedback from my readers is always welcome.  I value each opinion about my presentation and I always strive to get better at them.  I doubt I’ll ever be the most effective public speaker out there, but I want to avoid boring most people to death.

VMware vSphere: What’s New [5.0] – Review

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As I spend a lot of my time in training and learning about new technologies, I thought it might be a good idea to start reviewing the classes that I attend to help my readers figure out how to get the best out of their training dollars.  Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the 2-day VMware vSphere: What’s New [5.0] class.

If you are thinking about becoming a VMware Certified Professional (VCP), you’re going to need to go to class.  It’s a requirement for certification.  I don’t necessarily agree with this though.  No other certification I hold requires me to go to class.  The CISSP requires a certain level of experience, and when I looked at the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) requirements, they said that their required class could be waived with demonstrable experience.  So the fact that VMware is making me go to class is kind of irritating.  That’s even taking into account that my employer sees the usefulness of staying certified and lets me attend a large number of classes.  I really feel for the independent contractors that need to be VCPs to get into the field but can’t afford to either pay for the class or take the time off for 2-4 days to attend one.  There should be some kind of waiver for people that can demonstrate experience with VMware.  Yes, I know that if you are a 1-step removed VCP (VCP4 in this case) you don’t have to go to class.  Yes, I know that there are very good reasons to make people attend class, such as keeping current with new technology and ensuring your certified user base is up on all the new features.  Yes, I know that the costs of the class are necessary for things like facilities rental and materials.  Just because I understand why it’s required and why it’s so expensive doesn’t mean I have to like it.  But, I digress…

I chose to take the 2-day What’s New class because it was a quicker way to go through the requirements as well as being valid for upgrading my VCP3 to a VCP5 until February.  The 2-day What’s New class is a condensed version of the 4-day Install, Configure, and Manage (ICM) class that introduces VMware to those that are new to virtualization.  Being condensed, the prerequisites for the course state you must be familiar with VMware.  While you don’t need to be intimately familiar with every aspect of the hypervisor and it’s settings, you had better at least be comfortable logging into vCenter and doing some basic tasks.  There won’t be much time for hand-holding in the What’s New class.

The materials for the 2-day class are a 270-page student manual with the slide deck from the class printed in note-taking format and an 80-page lab guide.  The student guide has ample annotations of the slide deck as well as space for taking notes in class.  The lab guide has places to record the information for your student lab pods so you aren’t constantly flipping back and forth to remember what your vCenter or ESXi servers are named.  The lab guide went into good detail about each task, making sure that you knew where to go to enable features or perform tasks.  The lab guide is great for those that want to do a little more practice after leaving the class in a personal lab environment.

The material covered in the class focused on the new features in vSphere 5 and how it’s different from vSphere 4.  Special attention is paid to the new storage features and the new deployment options for ESXi servers, like stateless Auto Deploy.  Thanks to the ample amount of lab time, you have a great opportunity to reinforce the topics with actual examples rather than just staring at static screens on slides.  If you get a really good instructor (like we had), you can even see live configurations of these topics on their lab machines.  Rick, our instructor, made sure to show us live examples every chance he had rather than just relying on stuffy slides.  He also did a great job going into depth on topics that deserved it, like VMware HA changes and elections.  By the way, for anyone that has ever complained about HSRP elections or STP root bridge selection, you should really check out http://www.yellow-bricks.com and get Ducan Epping’s vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book.  Therein, you will learn in vSphere 5, 99 is greater than 100 when performing HA elections.  I’ll give you hint: lexical numbers don’t follow normal rules…

Tom’s Take

Overall, I found the condensed version of class to be a much better value than the 4-day ICM course.  On the other hand, I’ve also been working with VMware for the last 3 years, so I had a good grasp on the basics.  For someone that isn’t familiar with the way virtualization works, the 4-day ICM class will give you a much more measured understanding and more time to play with the basics.  For those that have already gotten their feet wet with VMware and are just looking for a tune up or need to go take the VCP5 exam, you can’t go wrong with the 2-day short, short version of the class.  It’s going to save you a good deal of time and money that you can use to buy more licenses for vRAM.

If you’d like to see more details on the VMware education offerings or sign up for a VMware class, head over to the VMware Education Website at http://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/www/

Dirty Chai – The Engineer’s Little Helper

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From time to time, I still see tweets about asking about the dirty chai.  The hallmark of any rough morning or caffeine-deficient situation, the dirty chai combines many things that are both delicious and useful into a small, portable package.  A little background…

What most people refer to as “chai” is actually a specific kind of spiced tea with milk known as Masala Chai.  I’ve been drinking these things for years.  The smooth taste is much more agreeable to me than strong coffee.  On a cold day, it really hits the spot with its combination of spices and richness.  However, one of the downsides of the delicious chai is the low amount of caffeine.  Due to the tea used and the brewing process, very little caffeine makes it into the drink.  Great if you are looking for something to drink right before bed or to calm you down.  Not so great if you find yourself in need of an energy infusion, or in my case, a jumpstart at the beginning of the day.  After all, hot drinks without caffeine are like beer without alcohol.  What’s the point?

Jennifer Huber introduced me to the concept of a “dirty” chai.  After ordering your typical hot chai drink, have the barista pour in an additional shot of espresso.  I wasn’t for sure the first time I ordered this drink, even going so far as to order it by recipe instead of using the sobriquet “dirty”.  When the barista confirmed that this was indeed “dirty”, I knew I’d found something good.  By adding the additional shot of espresso, the caffeine content is kicked through the roof.  The bitter flavor I typically associate with espresso shots is mellowed by the rich flavor of the chai.  A win/win situation.  If you find yourself in need of an additional pick-me-up, you can double the amount of espresso for a “double dirty” chai.  I hesitate to recommend the triple shot version before you’ve built up a tolerance, as mainlining that much espresso with chai could lead to molecular vibrations that will cause you to pass through solid objects or travel back in time.  Caveat drinkor.

In case you need a better example of the universal appeal of the dirty chai, check out this little example from Tech Field Day 5 in San Jose from February:

Happy Twitterversary To Me!

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Today marks the one year anniversary of my first tweet on Twitter.  I’d sing the “Happy Birthday” song, but the royalties on that little gem would cost me a fortune.  Instead, I’m going to spend some time talking about why I think Twitter is so very useful for IT people.

I have always spent a lot of time reading blogs.  Great content in concise, easy-to-digest format.  Especially when I started studying for my CCIE lab.  However, last year I noticed that some of my CCIE blogs weren’t being updated anymore, specifically CCIE Candidate and CCIE Pursuit.  I figured that CCIE Candidate wasn’t being updated quite as regularly anymore due to Ethan getting his number, so I decided to do a little digging.  Turns out Ethan had a new, non-CCIE focused blog at PacketAttack, but also had an account on Twitter (@ecbanks).  Now, I had my misgivings about Twitter.  It was a microblogging site dedicated to people telling me what the had for lunch or when they were taking a constitutional.  All the previous experiences I had seen on Twitter led me to believe that it wasn’t exactly a fun place to be.

However, after reading through Ethan’s tweets, I realized that there was a lot of good information and discussion that was being posted there.  I searched around and found a couple of other good tweet streams, including one from a real-life friend that I didn’t get to see much, Brad Stone (@bestone).  After mulling the decision back and forth for a day or two, I decided to take the plunge.  I tried several names before I finally came up with one that I thought personified both my desire for technical discussion and my outlook on things, @networkingnerd.  Once I signed up for Twitter, I started following a few people that I had found, like Ethan, Brad, and Narbik Kocharians (@narbikk).  I knew that the only way I could get more involved with what was going on was to start talking and see if anyone was listening.  At first, it felt like the guys in the park standing on a soapbox with a bullhorn, shouting for all the world to hear but no one really listening.  Once I figured out how to address someone with a tweet to get their attention, the followers started taking off a little more.  Part of the key for me was staying focused on networking and tech and injecting a little snarkiness and humor along the way (something that would pay off later when I started blogging).

Another part of the reason I got involved with Twitter was to feel like a larger part of the IT community.  Last year, my annual sojurn to Cisco Live was coming up fast, and Cisco had been releasing a lot of good information and tips for Cisco Live attendees on Twitter.  Now, when I go to Cisco Live, I have a group of 5-6 people that I usually hang out with and do things like take the Cisco Challenge in the World of Solutions or heckle the bands at the Customer Appreciation Event.  However, thanks to Twitter this year I’ve got 50-60 people that I’m going to be hanging out with and meeting for the first time in real life.  Twitter also helped me get more information about events like Tech Field Day, which I had no idea about.  Later, Twitter helped me get my first invite to Tech Field Day, both through my involvement in the community and Twitter’s gateway effect that drove me to start blogging out my longer thoughts (like this one).

Twitter isn’t for everyone.  Some people have a hard time keeping up with the firehose of information that you get blasted with.  Others have a really hard time condensing thoughts down to less that 140 characters.  Still others never really find the right group to get involved in and write Twitter of as stupid or childish.  My counter to thinking such as that is “You get what you put into it.”  I search out new and fun people to follow all the time.  I’m not afraid to unfollow someone if their tweets become pointless and overly distracting.  Twitter, for me, is about discussion.  Helping answer questions, learning about industry news before my bosses, even railing against hated protocols.  All of these things have increased the payoff I have received from Twitter in the last year.

At the same time, I make sure to respect the wishes of those that follow me.  I tend to relegate my non-IT related posts to something like Facebook.  I may post personal things on Twitter from time to time, but I tend to think of them more as little details about my life that help fill in the dark spots about me.  I don’t post about sports, even though my Facebook wall in the fall is a virtual commentary on college football every week. I don’t let applications tweet things for me if I can help it.  I don’t link my 4square account or let an unfollower app shout things no one else is interested in.  I have total control over my Twitter account to be sure that those that take time out of their schedules to listen to what I have to say will hear my words and not those of some robot.  Those that let their Twitter streams become a wasteland of contest entries and “I just unfollowed X people that didn’t follow me back” updates from applications usually fall by the wayside sooner or later.

Tom’s Take

People I know in real life make fun of me when I tell them I’m on Twitter.  They crack jokes about updates from the water closet or useless junk spamming my Twitter feed.  However, when the joking stops and they ask me what’s so compelling about it, I tell them “On Twitter, I learn things I actually WANT to know.”  My Facebook feed is a bunch of game updates and garbage about stuff I really don’t care to know most of the time.  Until my Twitter followers started friending me on Facebook, no one on Facebook knew about the depths of my nerdiness.  On Twitter, I feel free to talk about things like BGP or NAT without fear that I’m going to be deluged with comments from people who are hopelessly lost or would rather talk about the Farmville animals.  On Twitter, I’m free to indulge myself.  And the community that I’ve become a part of helps me develop and become a better person.  Without Twitter, I would never have been able to find so many people across the world that share my interests.  I never would have been pushed to increase the depth of my knowledge.  Dare I say it, I probably wouldn’t have been driven to get my CCIE nearly as much as I was thanks to the help of my Twitter friends.  In short, I’m glad I’ve had my first year on Twitter be as successful as it has been.  Here’s to many more.

An Outsider’s View of Junosphere

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It’s no secret that learning a vendor’s equipment takes lots and lots of time at the command line interface (CLI).  You can spend all the time you want pouring over training manuals and reference documentation, but until you get some “stick time” with the phosphors of a console screen, it’s probably not going to stick.  When I was studying for my CCIE R&S, I spent a lot of time using GNS3, a popular GUI for configuring Dynamips, the Cisco IOS simulator developed by the community.  There was no way I would be about to afford the equipment to replicate the lab topologies, as my training budget wasn’t very forgiving outside the test costs and any equipment I did manage to scrounge up usually went into production soon after that.  GNS3 afforded me the opportunity to create my own lab environments to play with protocols and configurations.  I’d say 75-80% of my lab work for the CCIE was done on GNS3.  The only things I couldn’t test were hardware-specific configurations, like the QoS found on Catalyst switches, or things that caused massive processor usage, like configuring NTP on more than two routers.  I would have killed to have had access to something a little more stable.

Cisco recently released a virtual router offering based around IOS-on-Unix (IOU), a formerly-internal testing tool that was leaked and cracked for use by non-Cisco people.  The official IOU simulation from Cisco revolves around their training material, so using it to setup your own configurations is very difficult.  Juniper Networks, on the other hand, has decided to release their own emulated OS environment built around their own hardware operating system, Junos.  This product is called Junosphere.  I was recently lucky enough to take part in a Packet Pushers episode where we talked with some of the minds behind Junosphere.  What follows here are my thoughts about the product based on this podcast and some people in the industry that I’ve talked to.

Junosphere is a cloud-based emulation platform being offered by Juniper for the purpose of building a lab environment for testing or education purposes.  The actual hardware being emulated inside Junosphere is courtesy of VJX, a virtual Junos instance that allows you to see the routing and security features of the product.  According to this very thorough Q&A from Chris Jones, VJX is not simply a hacked version of Junos running in a VM.  Instead, it is a fully supported release track code that simply runs on virtual hardware instead of something with blinking lights.  This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities down the road, very similarly to Arista Networks vEOS virtualized router.  VJX evolved out of code that Juniper developers originally used to test the OS itself, so it has strong roots in the ability to emulate the Junos environment.  Riding on top of VJX is a web interface that allows you to drag-and-drop network topologies to create testing environments, as well as the ability to load preset configurations, such as those that you might get from Juniper to coincide with their training materials.  To reference this to something people might be more familiar with, VJX is like Dyanmips, and the Junosphere lab configuration program is more like GNS3.

Junosphere can be purchased from a Juniper partner or directly from Juniper just like you would with any other Juniper product.  The reservation system is currently set up in such a way as to allot 24-hour blocks of time for Junosphere use.  Note that those aren’t rack tokens or split into 8-hour sessions.  You get 24 continuous hours of access per SKU purchase.  Right now, the target audience for Junosphere seems to be the university/academic environment.  However, I expect that Juniper will start looking at other markets once they’ve moved out of the early launch phase of their product.  I’m very much aware that this is all very early in the life cycle of Junosphere and emulated enviroments, so I’m making sure to temper my feelings with a bit of reservation.

As it exists right now, Junosphere would be a great option for the student wanting to learn Junos for the first time in a university or trade school type of setting.  By having continuous access to the router environments, these schools can add the cost of Junosphere rentals onto the student’s tuition costs and allow them 24-hour access to the router pods for flexible study times.  For self-study oriented people like me, this first iteration is less compelling.  I tend to study at odd hours of the night and whenever I have a free moment, so 24-hour access isn’t nearly as important to me as having blocks of 4 or 8 hours might be.  I understand the reasons behind Juniper’s decision to offer the time the way they have.  By offering 24-hour blocks, they can work out the kinks of VJX being offered to end users that might not be familiar with the quirks of emulated environments, unlike the developers that were the previous user base for the product.

Tom’s Take

I know that I probably need to learn Junos at some point in the near future.  It makes all the sense in the world to try and pick it up in case I find myself staring at an SRX in the future.  With emulated OS environments quickly becoming the norm, I think that Junosphere has a great start on providing a very important service.  As I said on Packet Pushers, to make it more valuable to me, it’s going to need to be something I can use on my local machine, ala GNS3 or IOU.  That way, I can fire it up as needed to test things or to make sure I remember the commands to configure IS-IS.  Giving me the power to use it without the necessity of being connected to the Internet or needing to reserve timeslots on a virtual rack is the entire reason behind emulating the software in the first place.  I know that Junosphere is still in its infancy when it comes to features and target audiences.  I’m holding my final judgement of the product until we get to the “run” phase of the traditional “crawl, run, walk” mentality of service introduction.  It helps to think about Junosphere as a 1.0 product.  Once we get the version numbers up a little higher, I hope that Juniper will have delivered a product that will enable me to learn more about their offerings.

For more information on Junosphere, check out the Junosphere information page at http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/software/junos-platform/junosphere/.