PRO Tips: pros only, please

November 20, 2008 in Virtualizationism | 4 comments

I recently had the opportunity to attend a two-day Microsoft training class on Hyper-V and SCVMM 2008.  This was a typical Microsoft course with hands-on labs and was billed as a Technical Deep-Dive – whatever that means.

I was particularly interested in PRO Tips, which is consistently mentioned as a key benefit of SCVMM.  It is supposed to compete with VMware DRS, except that PRO relies on System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) while DRS is simply an easy-to-use feature of VirtualCenter. 

Considering the importance of this feature, I expected to see one of the labs cover the SCVMM-SCOM integration and PRO Tips.  No such luck.  We spent time applying hotfixes and rebooting Windows Server 2008 to install the Hyper-V role and other Deep-Dive topics like that.

Instead, PRO Tips received a couple PowerPoint slides and some hand waving about how great it is to be able to automatically migrate your virtual machines – and introduce downtime thanks to quick migration.

I did appreciate the fact that the instructor acknowledged this serious omission.  He intended to at least demonstrate PRO Tips in action, but resources fell short.

If PRO Tips cannot be covered in two days, due to the complexity of SCOM integration, who in the world is really going to be deploying Microsoft virtualization with all of the advertised features?  Probably just the two thousand.

Related posts:

  1. SCVMM/PRO Complexity: High
  2. Save $14,970 on VMware ESX management
  3. Two thousand?
  4. Say it ain’t so, PRO!
  5. Hyper-V Console Disconnects During Live Migration

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4 comments

  1. Duncan’s avatar

    Duncan on November 20, 2008 at 11:57 pm

    :-)

    You’ve definitely got the same sense of humour I have.

  2. Eric Gray’s avatar

    Eric Gray on November 21, 2008 at 9:09 am

    Humor? What humor? This is serious!

    :-)

  3. Carlo’s avatar

    Carlo on November 28, 2008 at 9:44 am

    Eric,

    I also took this 2 day “class” up in Boston. Consider yourself fortunate that you actually had an instructor that knew the product at least. My trainer’s next gig was a vista desktop user class. (Literally!)

    Was your slide deck the same poorly translated German version that mine was?

  4. Eric Gray’s avatar

    Eric Gray on November 28, 2008 at 10:32 am

    Ja! Same materials. It is clear that the course was quickly thrown together.

    It’s good to know that I am not alone in my assessment.

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