The first steps in the Microsoft Virtual Academy - taking the plunge on virtualisation

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It was, ahem, a good many years ago now but I still remember the feeling of horror when confronted with a multiple choice paper for my Chemistry A level.

None of our exams up until then had been multiple choice so this was a bit of a novelty and I remember that we convinced ourselves that this would be a doddle as, after all, they told us the answer. I was about to get a rude awakening.

Of course, it’s true that the answers were there – but there were also lots of other options, all of which sounded equally plausible. I passed but it was a nasty shock.

And multiple-choice questions still have that power to shock: after stumbling through the first two in the Microsoft Virtual Academy, I was transported back all those years to my scruffy and long-haired 18-year-old self frantically trying to remember the difference between Boyle’s Law and Charles’ Law. I got through them both (at the second time of asking) but it was an unnerving experience.

If you recall last week, I'm going to spend the next eight weeks ploughing through Microsoft's Virtual Academy, really testing my knowledge of cloud and virtualisation technology and am inviting you to join me; take the courses with me and tell me about your experience (max_cooter@dennis.co.uk).

We're going to print the best replies and, remember, the reader with the best score will win a new laptop and top-of-the-range coffee machine.

I started with the Microsoft Virtualisation for VMware Professionals - The Platform track. It seemed like the most relevant for me but there's no set order for doing the modules. I should say right off that I’m not a VMware professional, so I’m not exactly the target audience. Nor do I run a network, nor do I have access to a server – which means that I’m lacking the means for some hands-on experience (I’m looking to rectify this point at some point as I believe that this is not a subject that should be restricted to theory).

Students of this course are offered Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with SP1 as downloads and I definitely think that having hands-on experience would help. A few years back I did my CCNA as part of which, Cisco offers a virtual lab so that students get real practice in configuring routers and working out IP addresses – something that would have been useful here (but then, Cisco charges heavily for its course while Microsoft is providing this material entirely free of charge - the much better deal).

The course itself provided an overview of virtualisation, explaining some terms on the way. The first video looked very much at what virtualisation was and why it would help some organisations – there was a bit of time spent explaining the difference between VDI and desktop virtualisation, a distinction that some vendors are quite keen to blur. The conversation jumped a bit and, perhaps because it was an introduction and didn’t really get to grips with much that was concrete, I found it a bit tricky to make notes. There was another issue too, but more of that later.

All the teaching is through video with some slides – the slides are not displayed for very long on screen so there’s lots of use for the ‘pause’ button. All the videos that I’ve seen so far have been presented by the same two presenters – Symon Perriman, a clean-cut Microsoft evangelist and Corey Hynes, an independent consultant. The pair make for an engaging team but more slides would definitely help the learning process.

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