How to get hands-on experience

- When learning Cisco Collaboration Technologies, getting some hands-on experience can really deepen your understanding as we go through the theory and the demonstrations in this course. Even if you've heard that there are no simulation questions on the exam, I still think getting at least some hands-on experience can really deepen your understanding. And in this module, we want to take a look at a couple of different ways of getting that hands-on experience. Number one, maybe you have access to the communications manager software, Version 12.5, or even 12.0 is fine, and if you do, even if you don't have a license, if you've got the software, you get a 90 day evaluation of the software, which is really all we need to do for our studies. If you do have access to that software, we're going to show you, in this module, how to install for free a licensed copy of VMware's ESXi, and you can install that on a server, and on top of that server, install the virtual machine running Communications Manager Version 12.5 or 12.0. And not only can we virtualize a server in that environment, we can virtualize switches and routers, and we're also going to see how we can get, for free from Cisco, a CSR 1000V image, so we can install that as a virtual machine, an actual full-blown router. But if you do not have access to the Communications Manager software, and we'll talk about a couple of options for getting that access, but if you don't have access, you can still go out, for free, and use Cisco's DevNet Sandbox, they do a great job of providing us with all sorts of free access to equipment. And they've got, at the time of this recording, a Version 12.5 Collaboration Lab, and it's all continually changing in the Sandbox, we're always updating, but I'll bet, when you're watching this recording, there's going to be some collaboration topology you can go out to and use for free to get some hands-on experience. But join me in our next video as we get started in this module with a look at how we can install, for free again, that VMware ESXi Hypervisor on a server. I'll see you there in just a moment.