Resources - vSphere Tutorial

- [Rick] In this video, we'll take a look at some of the resources that are available to help you learn more about virtual SAN. And the first resource that we're going to look at is the VMware Hands-On Labs, which are available at hol.vmware.com. The free labs that VMware provides are excellent and best of all they are free. So go to hol.vmware.com, you can see Labs here and I'm just going to click on Launch. And once we get into the lab area, you need the login or register. So you can create your own free account here and register and try any of these hands-on labs that you want absolutely free. What I'm interested in for this course is the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure labs. So here we can see the first lab that's available for vSan, vSAN Getting Started. And you can see here you can go and set up a vSAN environment, you can look at how to monitor health, capacity and performance. You can do a lab on availability, interoperability and security as well. And if we scroll down a little bit further, we can also see a vSAN Challenge Lab. So once you've completed the first lab, this lab walks you through some troubleshooting exercises and reconfiguring vSAN network, so some more advanced challenges related to vSAN. So there's some really great hands-on labs that you can complete free of charge here and that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you're interested in NSX or vSphere labs or labs on just about anything that VMware provides, you can find many of them here. The next resource that I want to take a look at is the VMware vSAN Product Page. And this is going to be a resource that we use to kind of show you how to get to a whole bunch of other resources, so let's take a look. So here we are on the VMware vSAN Product Page and there's a whole bunch of information here, product overviews, data sheets, things like that. If we scroll down, we can see some use cases, we can see some of the customers and we can see some comparisons between the different licensing additions that are available with vSAN. We can also find a whole bunch of resources and documentation here as well. So this is really your jumping off point. If you're looking to do anything related to vSAN, this is the ideal starting point. And the next resource that we're going to look at is the vSAN Data Sheet. So we're going to focus on the vSAN Data Sheet for a little while and also learn a little bit about the requirements that we have to satisfy in order to run vSAN. So here I am at the vSAN Product Page, I'm just going to click on vSAN Data Sheet. And here we go, we have vSAN at a glance, walking us through some of the overall concepts on vSAN and hyper converged infrastructure. Some of the kind of really basic information about vSAN encryption and iSkuzi and some of the other features that are supported by it. And then if we scroll all the way to the last page of the document, here you can find the system requirements. So, I would recommend if you want to know what the system requirements are for any particular version of vSAN, at the moment, the current version is vSAN 6.7. Who knows what it might be when you watch this course? You can always go to the current data sheet and see which versions of vSphere, which versions of vCenter and what types of hosts are required, what's the maximum cluster size. You can find all this great information on the vSAN data sheet. Also present on the vSAN product page is a licensing and packaging document. So here I am back at the vSAN product page and if we click right here on the Licensing & Packaging White Paper. We can find all the pertinent details related to licensing and packaging vSAN 6.7. So here we see all the different licensing editions that are available. We can also see all the different features that are available with the different licensing editions. And as we scroll through the document, you can see information on many of the features that are possible with vSAN and an explanation of how some of these features relate to your licensing. Like for example, a two-node vSAN appointment model or a stretched cluster. All of these features and the licensing requirements that go along with them are broken down here in this document. So if you're kind of confused about vSAN licensing or just want to learn more about the licensing model, this is the great place to get started with that.