**The World of VMware Hands-On Labs**

For anyone interested in exploring the world of virtualization and cloud computing, VMware's hands-on labs are an incredibly valuable resource. These interactive learning environments allow users to experiment with various VMware products in a real-world setting, without the need for expensive hardware or infrastructure. In this article, we'll take a closer look at how VMware's hands-on labs work, and why they're an essential tool for anyone looking to learn about virtualization.

**A Platform That Runs on Raspberry Pi 4**

One of the most exciting developments in the world of VMware is the introduction of hands-on labs that can be run on a Raspberry Pi 4. This tiny device packs a punch when it comes to processing power and storage, making it an ideal platform for testing out various VMware products. With a Raspberry Pi 4, users can access all sorts of virtualization tools and technologies, from vSphere to NSX, without breaking the bank. This is a game-changer for anyone looking to get started with virtualization on a budget.

**VMware Hands-On Labs**

VMware's hands-on labs are a treasure trove of interactive learning experiences. With over 1100 sessions available, users can choose from a wide range of topics and skills areas, including managing multiple virtual clouds, empowering frontline workers, multi-cloud, modernisation, security, and more. Each session is designed to be hands-on, allowing users to experiment with real-world scenarios and learn by doing. Whether you're looking to improve your skills or just get started with virtualization, VMware's hands-on labs have something for everyone.

**Accessing Hands-On Labs**

One of the best things about VMware's hands-on labs is how easily accessible they are. Simply register for a free account on the VMware website, and you'll be able to access all sorts of interactive learning experiences. The content catalog is nicely sorted by topic, making it easy to find what you're looking for. And with no need for expensive hardware or infrastructure, anyone can get started.

**Tech Plus Pass**

For those who want to take their learning to the next level, VMware's Tech Plus Pass is a great option. This pass gives users access to all sorts of exclusive content, including hands-on labs, guided workshops, and expert sessions. With a Tech Plus Pass, users will also receive a 50% discount on VCP and VCAP certification exams, making it an even more compelling value.

**The Benefits of VMware Hands-On Labs**

So why should you bother with VMware's hands-on labs? For one thing, they're incredibly accessible – anyone can register for free and start learning. They're also a great way to learn about virtualization and cloud computing without breaking the bank. And finally, they provide an essential skillset that will serve you well in any career related to IT or virtualization.

**VMworld**

Of course, no discussion of VMware would be complete without mentioning VMworld – the premier conference for anyone interested in virtualization and cloud computing. With over 1100 sessions available, users can learn from industry experts and network with peers. And with a Tech Plus Pass, attendees will also have access to exclusive content, including hands-on labs and guided workshops.

**Cool Guest Speakers**

This year's VMworld lineup includes some amazing guest speakers – including Michael J. Fox and Robin Arsen, who will be sharing their insights on the latest trends in virtualization and cloud computing.

**Conclusion**

VMware's hands-on labs are an incredible resource for anyone looking to learn about virtualization and cloud computing. With interactive learning experiences, expert-led sessions, and exclusive content, there's something for everyone. Whether you're just getting started or looking to take your skills to the next level, VMware's hands-on labs have everything you need to succeed in this exciting field.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni've got something very special for you today i'm joined by joe bagley from vmware cto of amir uh this is your 11th year of vmworld vmworld is an upcoming event there's a link below it's free registration you can learn all about vmware that kind of thing i still believe that vmware is on the leading edge of all the cool stuff with everything for virtualization and so there's a lot of really cool stuff you can learn but we're going to have a chat so this is exciting thank you it's great to be here so i'd like to think we're on the leading edge of more than just virtualization but we can talk about that yeah no well yeah i don't yeah yeah no definitely uh 11th year now you were we were talking a little bit before the stream and you said something about vegas and it was like a rock star uh kind of thing you had the you had the rockstar experience in vegas at a vmware event oh it's very funny because um yeah my my my first vmware when i joined over 10 years ago was was way back when and then i first was on stage in a major keynote in 2013 with karl eschenbach and kit colbert who's now our cto and um yeah the scary thing was imagine going on stage in front of 20 000 plus people live was just you know i've got i've got a friend who is in a rock band and he always used to mock that you know i basically get to go on larger stages than he does and yet he's meant to be the rock star uh he's now been in front of larger stages so he beats me still but i won't tell you who he is but yeah it's it was it was a fun experience quite nerve-wracking as well there was the big joke at the time that i was very brave because i went out wearing light color light-colored chinos or slacks and there was this you know what if you spill coffee on them before you go out i didn't even think about that i just thought they look good so yeah it's a it's a it's a very special event it's a it's really cool to be in person with a whole bunch of what feels like friends who just want to be there and learn stuff and so it's been it's been difficult to do it virtual it's uh it's really exciting this year for vmworld and all of the stuff that is coming down the pike it looks like for technology and uh you know we did some throwdowns on stuff so hopefully people will see that and check that out but i really do think that you know it's like maybe it's the year of the linux desktop but it's the year of you know the devops infrastructure is code it's going to finally be here i i don't know maybe i hope it is because it's really exciting and innovative and it's less work but i don't i don't know if you ask my friend sean bass he'll tell you it's the year of vdi it's the year of vdi every year right so we'll get to that one but yeah i think it's the year of a lot of things i think what we're seeing is the maturity in a lot of areas i think a lot of reality is sinking in we're kind of cutting past the hype of cloud people are realizing that multi-cloud is a reality not everything's going to end up in one cloud we're starting to settle down past the hype of edge devops is not so much the coolest thing anymore people are sitting down and working at how we're actually going to do it and introducing security into that too um you know if you look across what we're doing in in the developer space it's much more about the practicalities of a multi-cloud platform and the tools that you need to get applications up and running on multi-cloud and i think you know there's still that focus on infrastructure from people if they want it there's still an awful lot of really cool stuff going on infrastructure but as as our customers head up the stack they focus more on what are they doing with their apps where their apps going next and what their app's going to be doing in three years time it's more interesting to have those discussions with them now on a broader basis than you know maybe 10 years ago we were reinventing the data center and now we're reinventing the cloud and i i you know that sounds really cheesy it sounds like some marketing tagline but it's truly what what i believe we're doing in terms of how we're doing this i think you know at least from i'm i'm basically a computer janitor so from the cheap seats from the peanut gallery if you will um you really sort of started to notice a change in executive attitude the last couple of years with the global situation it's like oh our it infrastructure is such that we can pivot and move to vdi and move some of our applications and scale things a little differently to deal with you know a workforce that's maybe working remotely or to deal with you know a different customer needs that we have because everything is everything is completely different yeah it's been cool in a in a really weird way because the pandemic should never be cool right but i think a lot of people have you know there's been a lot of talk about you know it's the ultimate proof of concept it's the ultimate whatever i think the bottom line is that a lot of what people said wasn't possible became possible because it had to become possible because there was no alternative so a lot of that naysaying that had been said by senior executives or whoever and usually security departments or other in some organizations or finance departments that said this is impossible too expensive it's not going to work or just those people that said we can't meet on zoom all the time because it'll never work and and people have had to and i think the great thing is that we've been forced so far in some directions that we will never go back but in other places we've been forced to a point where we've tried things we've got actually you know that doesn't quite work for us yet maybe we need to pull back a little bit so i'm looking forward to over the next 18 months a lot of organizations finding that happy medium not just for technology but for literally how everyone goes to work and i think you know that's a top topic for everyone it's fun to watch um something that i've i feel like has been happening over this same time period is that we've had really incredible hardware and software innova innovation that drive some of those workloads and so like i'll give you some specifics uh uh people on our channel uh some of my early and favorite projects that i can't wait to talk about is running gaming virtual machines under linux so that i don't have to deal with windows shenanigans as much or whatever the anti-cheat kernel module has done to my kernel to make my system slightly more unstable and it's like do i really want to do online banking on the same machine that's got a basically a kernel level root kit and so we've got all these projects but now in hardware innovation the last couple years we've got interrupts that pass through from the real hardware to a virtual machine without the host knowing and and now direct to dma and uh things like rdma for networking so we've got almost bare metal latency from here to there and you know it's i'm sure there's a lot of software innovation on that side as well where do you see that going or have you have you seen the same same thing or is it just sort of you know bog standard pace of the industry what are your thoughts on that also in in the office of the cto which is where i work and specifically in sort of you know our research and innovation part we're spending a lot of time looking at those really cool hardware innovations you'd be surprised how many conversations i have around gpus dpus xpus fpgas and all these other wonderful different bits and pieces and you know write down into exactly what's going on with some of those technologies you talked about how that's changing the fabric of our of our compute infrastructure because you know the world is changing from what they thought was oh well you've got the x86 cpu and we've virtualized that so that's done and now everything's going to happen above that in software that's definitely not the case there's some really really cool and interesting harper innovations coming on almost a daily basis and i think you know when you look at also what's happening around some of the you know arm-based chipsets and arm becoming a little bit more of a serious player in the data center much to you know some people's surprise where it was you know just something that ran on mobiles originally but you know there's massive change going on and what runs in our data centers there's massive change in in the harbor that's available to people and so it's down to companies like us to make that software work really well with that hardware to get the most out of that hardware and make that hardware available to as many people as possible so a lot of the cutting edge sessions you'll see at vmworld will be talking about how we're doing exactly those kind of things yeah and and to break that down a little further even like from a programmer's perspective or somebody that is trying to practice you know devops and that kind of thing you don't want your programmer to have to think about you know in the beginning with the compiler it was like alignment you don't want to have to worry about alignment you don't want to have to worry about which sort of memory copy you use but now when we're working with multi-terabyte data sets you don't want the programmer to have to think about well how is this going to scale from 8 to 64 cores or a thousand cores or is this going to use this math kernel library or is it going to use that math kernel library you want to give the developer the tools that they can do some you know some of the homework in the evaluation but you know you guys have got to provide the software layer to make the hardware layer accessible because otherwise it's not good and that was always the thing right back to when we first started with cloud foundry 10 plus years ago it was that command line where we can just scale it by 10 by typing plus 10 you know whatever it was you know that's really what we've been trying to get to it was that infrastructure as code and you know people keep bringing out new and cool hardware we have to integrate that new and cool hardware into what we're offering so it's a constant fun challenge it's it's it's what sort of gets you up every morning because there's some really cool new tech to play with and i think that's really what we're all in this for one of the one of the other fun projects we did was um we were running some software in a virtual machine faster than you could run it on bare metal and it's because the software was making some really terrible assumptions about like it was probing the hardware and saying oh i need to behave this way and so we fixed it by lying to the software about what the hardware actually was and so then it was faster in virtual machines and that that sort of made me think is like when you talk about the innovation and how everything is developing it seems like building out these tools is actually shortening the life cycle of when you can actually take advantage of brand new hardware so the virtual machines that you're running today you don't necessarily have to make any software changes to whatever your awful application is that you did but you can totally take advantage of all the new technologies if you build on this on this stack well and we do that right i mean look what we've done with numa and stuff in the past in our hypervisor and if you look at what we're doing with containers where we now support containers in vsphere 7. um you know we're people who talk about bare metal containers which actually what they mean is that's actually containers running on a linux kernel when when we talk about containers we're now talking about containers running on our hypervisor on bare metal so to speak and oddly they run faster on our hypervisor on bare metal than they do on you know linux on bare metal because we've been optimizing our hypervisor for sharing resources around thousands of things for a very very long time so you know we've been focused on that and our scheduler probably is a little bit better than others in in doing that and so yeah and for us it's okay well what do we do next and now one of the projects you'll see at vmworld is has the ability to virtualize gpus into containers which is just so cool right so i've got containers how do i attach gpus into a container oh that's easy you just do it click click done in software those are the kind of things we're doing it's that flexible fabric piece so yeah as those new bits come in and people want to consume them in different ways that's what we're focused on and you can do that without having to necessarily update the latest and greatest software you guys are handling that at a lower level down the stack so that you know the developers don't really have to worry about that nearly as much and that's the really killer thing and i saw that it was like it was like 43 percent faster for some of the containerization workloads you guys had savings for context switches you guys had savings uh for memory overhead i don't know what you guys were doing but it was unholy blackmail it's like how is it 43 faster for some of these workloads how is that what that doesn't even make sense it's we have these moments in engineering when you you're doing these tests and suddenly it's like okay that's that like you that doesn't make sense that doesn't even make sense to us why is it that quick and you're like okay well we're measuring wrong we've got some other you know some counters wrong the way we're actually doing the measurement is wrong so we double check the measurement no no we're measuring right so then we have to almost backtrack and go okay what what why what oh you know this kind of oh okay and that's happened so many times i could tell you in the history of vmware where you're going oh cool you know wow all right you know so yeah and and it's really interesting that you know and then someone goes yeah that's what we meant it to do and you're like okay well that's really cool so i think a lot of people though there is disbelief there's even disbelief on our part sometimes so you know you sometimes feel like a bit of a fraud when you're going oh virtualize is faster than bare metal and people go yeah right whatever you're like no honestly it really is you know it can be because of think about how these things work the hypervisor has so many more benefits even just like the benefit of a newer compiler and it's looking at what your code is and it's like oh this is this is how we did things in 2006. we don't do that that way anymore yeah we're moving that up the stack as well so if you look what we're doing in spring for example it's just okay well how do we connect spring closer down to what we're doing down here but more importantly for someone using spring how do they get access to that stuff so to your point right they just have more stuff up here in spring they can play with they don't have to worry about it yeah this is what i think the the future of these kinds of services are and this is why i think some of the big cloud providers their margins may be in trouble a little bit because the value that they provide is not the compute in the cloud on any immediacy of that the value comes in the tool chain but if you look at the innovation that's happening in the tool chain on what you can get an edge compute or what you can get real access to that's a pretty good value proposition oh there's some such cool stuff i mean and don't forget we now have um esx or raspberry boy esx for arm which actually runs on raspberry pi 4. so you know if you want to really play at the edge you can really play at the edge with us and do some stuff in a really small way but have the same operations model all the way out to the edge so you know one day yeah we will probably have nsx for raspberry pi which will be something quite awesome yeah well you can and that's a great platform to learn on i mean most people don't realize but vmware actually has a bunch of these labs that are completely free like you just sign up and you do the thing and it's only pay for if you have an instructor that's actually like helping you do stuff but if you want to go through these on your own with a raspberry pi or you know your home lab machine or your thing like that it is a tremendous resource to learn not just vmware products but like how this stuff is done in the industry yeah and if you google vmware hands-on labs you'll you'll find a link straight to vmware hands-on apps and what that is is all online live feed to play you can test drive any vmware product in minutes so you know the stuff that people use to queue up and and in line at vmworld to go and play with is now available online for you to play with anywhere you like you don't even need your own hardware where you can come and do it on ours we have it all set up to pre-configure etc so that's there to play with and you know um we have even better versions of that new stuff with vmware so you know we're here talking about vmworld if people do want to register vmware vmworld is free so the general parts of vmworld is free that will get into the general session the solution keynotes the breaking yeah and the link below there's over 1100 sessions this year it's all on demand there's some amazing stuff you can do and it also gets into the demo zones and obviously these hands-on lab interactive sessions there is a tech plus pass which is 299 bucks and yeah that's if you want to do things like hands-on labs guided workshops where people will almost say you have a proctor that takes you through what you're doing there and i'll meet the expert sessions and the tech plus tutorials and the odyssey hands-on labs and all these bits and bits and pieces of dish on there but most of what you want to get you'll probably find you'll get with the general pass which also gives you a 50 discount on uh vcta exams as well so exactly and the tech plus pass it gives you 50 discount on vcp and vcap certification exams so there's a whole bunch of things you can do so if you haven't registered for vmware yet it's free it doesn't cost you anything registered just register now get your name down there have a look at the content catalog pick from some of the stuff you can do there and you know it's nicely sorted by topic which might be an easy way for you to find in you know whether you want what you want to do in like managing multiple virtual clouds empowering frontline workers or there's tracks around multi-cloud and that modernisation security or whatever you want to do so you know dig into that content catalog now register it's free go for it i would also add to that that even if you're not using vmware products or even interested in vmware products specifically the tracks will teach you how to think about these kind of products so if you work in this industry or you're a student some of these tracks are incredibly accessible they're made for somebody that was promoted into the position of computer janitor that may be a little over their head so it's a very very uh accessible format in a lot of cases and so you go through these and you start to learn the terminology and you start to have expectations for how your own infrastructure should work in your company you'll learn a lot and potentially save yourself a lot of future headache well plus you'd be surprised the number of people that i talk to and still think vmware all we do as a hypervisor there's so much more so even if you just come and attend some of the general sessions and find out all the stuff you're missing out on that you didn't know we did and and and also we've got some cool guest speakers we've got people like michael j fox who's going to be in the interview we've also got if you're a peloton person robin arsen is going to be on there there's a whole bunch of cool people up there too so it's going to be a fun event well this has been awesome thank you for our quick chat check out vmworld it's uh it's been awesome thanks very much wendell it's so cool to be here\n"