The World According to Mitch

I am asked all the time what are the best resources available to learn Hyper-V and the associated technologies – from the hypervisor to System Center, Failover Clustering, data protection, remote desktop and so much more – and the answer is simple: Take the course. Microsoft Learning’s course 10215A is an excellent offering that I teach quite often, chiefly but not exclusively for the Microsoft Partner Network in Canada.

Unfortunately not everyone can take my class.  There are a lot of reasons, including geography, cost, and availability.  Not every company is willing to allow their employees to take five days off to take a class, and realistically the class is not offered in every city or by every training centre.  To pay for a five day instructor-led MOC course is another reason – most centres charge over $2,000 to attend the five day class, and that does not include lunch or the cost of writing the exam.  Microsoft Canada has offer this course several times per year (and will continue to do so) and subsidizes it heavily making for one of the best deals in town… but there are only so many seats in the class, and you have to be one of the first fifteen.

There are a few other issues that I hear often, including complaints that there is a lot of information to digest in 5 days (and often taught in 4 days).  The labs should be made available after the course, which of course would greatly increase the value but also the cost.

So I am pleased to announce that Microsoft Learning has now released the course in e-learning format.  Collection 10215: Implementing and Managing Microsoft Server Virtualization is an on-line collection of six mini-courses:

• Course 10935: Virtualization Planning and Setting Up the Hyper-V Environment
• Course 10936: Using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2
• Course 10937: Configuring and Managing the VMM Library, User Roles, and the VMM Self-Service Portal
• Course 10938: Maintaining, Backing Up, and Restoring Virtual Machines
• Course 10939: High Availability, Monitoring, and Reporting
• Course 10940: Using Remote Desktop Services in a Virtualized Environment

The six courses include demos, practice questions, and labs, as well as yours truly on screen teaching most of the material in an abridged version of the ILT version.  It can be viewed either on-line, or downloaded and viewed off-line using the E-Learning Offline Player.  I was glad to find this out because I have a lot of airplane travel coming up in the next two months, and it will be a good use of my time.  Whether you plan to go through the courses on-line or off-line they will be a very good use of your time to go through them to learn Hyper-V, understand the tools around Hyper-V that make it a very viable alternative for VMware, and of course prepare yourself to pass exam 70-659!

E-Learning is a great alternative to instructor-led training (ILT) for a number of reasons.  Of course, as a professional IT trainer I truly believe that the best way to learn most technologies is to sit through my class.  I do not only teach the material on the slides (I hate RTFS instructors!), I try to convey to my students my real-world experience with the technologies, as well as the business value which is so important when speaking with CxOs.  However for students who cannot take the time or cannot spend the money, or for those who do not live close enough to a training centre that offers the course that the are interested in, e-learning allows students to learn the material (and prepare for the exam) from wherever they are, for a lower cost, and at their convenience.  They will never cancel at the last minute due to client emergencies, they will just go through the material at their convenience.  As for the real-world experience… well, for that you have The World According to Mitch

Let me know what you think about the course… I would love your feedback!