 My name is Jeff Weiss. I'm a 30 plus year IT professional and I've done pretty much every job in our field that you can imagine. I came from the era before DOS so you can tell how long I've been doing this. I've done every kind of networking there is out there and I've worked with all the major operating systems and all the major platforms. Today, my primary focus is Windows, Microsoft Technologies, and virtualization. I'm actually the executive vice president in charge of a bunch of companies but the primary one involved with this is VM training. We provide all kinds of training across the virtualization landscape as well as Microsoft and Cisco Technologies. All of them are boot camp oriented so you want to check out the catalog for all the different boot camps that are available through Career Academy. Now my experience in specific is not only just training but also consulting. So I like to bring a lot of experience to the table when we're doing our trainings. Here in chapter one, we're going to go over some of the introductory topics and the course methodology. We also have a certification exam that is normally associated with our major boot camp. Now this course doesn't provide you with all the information you need but since you're taking an upgrade course, you may already have the background and with the new information provided by this course, you might want to take the certification exam. If you do, you can purchase it at VMtraining.net slash cart. The exam itself is two hours, you need a 75% to pass and there are 80 questions on the exam. The physical setup for our environment is that we have four ESXi hosts and we have vCenter. We're currently running vCenter 5.5 version B but we'll be upgrading to update one next week as a matter of fact. We'll also be upgrading all the hosts to 5.5 update one as well. VM's training setup for the student environment is this. You'll be connecting from the outside world if you're doing labs through remote desktop protocol to a terminal server in our environment. Then everything else we have from there on out is a virtual machine. Now we do have a series of physical hosts and you may or may not be assigned those for your labs but chances are you'll be getting a virtual host in the future. Our own infrastructure has the hosts we mentioned before plus we have several iSCSI storage units. In addition, our network is something that is do as I say and not as I do. Unlike what you do in the real world with separate segments and subnets, we are one large class B broadcast based domain. We did that for all the different classes that we have to provide labs for. It was the simplest way for us to do that. In that respect, we use the third octet as a way of logically segmenting out what we use all our different servers for. Now in this picture, if you're doing the lab, the pound sign is going to be the number you're assigned for the entire class. The X relates to the terminal server number that you'll be connecting through. Also, if you're going to be doing the labs, we've written the lab manual with a series of standard phrases so you would know where you're going. There are many places you need to connect to and it's easy to get confused. So this grid is something you're going to refer back to if you ever get to infuse as to where you're supposed to be connecting. Things like RDP into means using the remote desktop protocol from your own desktop, you'll connect to the terminal server in our environment, although sometimes you do remote into some of the existing servers in our environment as well from the terminal server desktop. So read carefully in that respect. Now drag into only would apply if you have a physical server assigned to you for the labs. If you have a virtual server, you'll be opening console, which is the console into that you see lower in the table. Vic into means using the old dot net client or windows client or sometimes called the fat client to connect to either an ESXi host or a centralized vcenter. Putty is a program that allows you to use SSH to remotely connect through the command line to a host. Console into means once you've connected through vcenter or the web client, you're going to use or you're going to open a console into the VM. It's like sitting down at a normal computer and seeing the console that you would type everything in. Finally we have browse to and that's simply using the browser to connect. And to reiterate the pound sign is the number you are assigned for the entire class and the X is the number that is the terminal server number you're using. In addition, if you're doing the labs, there are certain conventions used throughout the lab manual. The words note, alert, hint, important and stop. There's also some icons that go along with them. If you see a stop, that means that we've basically had information in the lab manual from previous versions that we've left in there for reference, but you are actually completed with the lab at that point. Now most of the labs have numbered steps and you just follow the numbers and you do the steps in order. But if you see something like you see on the bottom of this screen where you have a numbered step and there are lettered steps below, the number is actually just a description of what you're about to do and the lettered steps are how you do it.