 Hello, my name is Dwayne Anderson. I'm really excited to be here and share with you the vSphere 4.1 Ultimate Boot Camp. Now, my background started quite a number of years ago in security. I started out in the security realm. Now, one of the things that's very interesting is when you get into security, you've got to really understand the architecture and what administrators do in order to be good at security. Now, what I'm talking about is penetration testing. Now, we're not going to get into all those details here, but I have to know the details of all of the different architectures in order for me to be able to pen test an infrastructure. So, what's happened is I moved into virtualization, well, let's just say five, six years ago, I started using some forms of virtualization. I just kept doing it from there. Now, I've had to delve into the depths of it in order to do really well on the security side. So, what I'm going to be doing throughout this entire course is giving you guys an insight that you might not see from other perspectives. We'll spend a lot of time on administration and a little bit on security, and you'll understand and see where my expertise comes in. I spent some time doing some consulting as well, and I'm hoping that my consulting work will help you out so that you can be much, much better at what you do on a daily basis. In this chapter, we're going to discuss course introduction methodology. Help you understand a little bit about where we're coming from so that you can learn it, do it, and know it. Our course methodology is designed so that you can learn it, do it, and know it. What we mean by that is learn it. We're going to give you lectures. We're going to go through details about all the different topics that we have to discuss. Then when it comes to do it, we have many demonstrations that we're going to perform for you so that you can understand how all of this functions within your environment. I would recommend that you go and practice those within your own environment so you make sure that you get comfortable with doing them. Then, of course, know it. We have questions designed to make sure that you have comprehended the details of all the lectures. Make sure that you're spending the time going through them. If you don't get a great score right away, go listen to some of those topics that you might not be so sure about and get really good and knowledgeable within each section and each chapter. The Certified Virtualization Expert Certification is an exam or a certification designed by VM Training. They went out to consultants in the real world and they said, hey, guys, what is it that a vSphere administrator really needs to know in order to be good at their job? So what they did is they developed this certification. It encompasses everything that a vSphere administrator needs, but it also makes sure that the vSphere administrator understands how this orchestrates or works with all of your physical environment. Now, this certification, you need to be able to take this class, this course. You need to be able to pass the CVE exam and then you receive the certification. We deliver the certification throughout many partners worldwide. If you're taking this course, just make sure you contact whoever you're working with and you'll be able to take that exam if you're interested. Now, this thing is $195. It's only 80 questions, two hours and a 75% passing score. You might be saying, well, it's only 75% passing score. It's not an easy exam. You'll need to make sure that you not only study what's here, but also pay attention to questions that we provide for you because they're going to help you prepare for what's coming with this certification. VM Training has a physical setup, a whole data center that's very similar to what you would see in a real world. Everything that we're going to be looking at when it comes to demonstrations are all set up within our data center. We've got the core of the data center, which is three dead Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers, lots of RAM, lots of processing power. I don't need to go through all those details. We also have storage devices. We're going to make use of some iSCSI devices during our demonstrations so that you can see how that works in the real environment. What I want you to know is that every demo that we do, every aspect of what is covered is virtualized. We're using it. It's not just a physical environment that we pretend to do virtualization. It is a real virtual environment. When I go to log in to do the demonstrations, what you're going to see is I'm going to be sitting at a computer and I'm just going to do a simple RDP session into our data center. From there, we access every aspect of our environment. For anybody that is doing some labs, then you're going to be able to do the exact same thing, RDP in through the internet to our systems. You'll have access to the terminal servers, to our domain controller, the NAT, SQL server, everything that a student needs. Everything that you would use in the real world is going to be there for me to demo and for you to use as well. Throughout the demonstrations that I'll be performing, we're going to have many different IP addresses that you're going to be seeing. I want you to take note of a few because some of them are very, very important. First of all, 172.16.1, that is our support servers. Everything that supports the background, they're all virtual machines, of course, is sitting there and that is the IP addressing scheme that will be utilized. The DRAC, the Dell Remote Access Client, that is 172.16.2, that's where all of your DRAC sit. And then the other two that I want you to remember, .3 and .4, the 172.16.3 is your vCenter servers and the 172.16.4 is your ESX host. The other ones all come into play a little bit, but not near as much. I just want to make sure that you remember those as we go through the demos so that you're not wondering who's he accessing, what is he accessing? 234, your DRAC, your vCenter, and your ESX or ESX-i host.