One of my responsibilities in the EVO:RAIL team is the Hands-on-Lab environment (HOL for short). I’m ably assisted by my colleague Judy Snow who helps test new versions and also in improving the lab guide that accompanies the lab. Boy, do I appreciate her help – as you can probably guess with my blog output – good spelling and grammar remain a challenge for me!
The HOL is important to the EVO:RAIL project – perhaps more important than other products, because EVO:RAIL is essentially a software experience delivered through a hardware appliance. One of my first thoughts when I joined the team in August, 2014 (Yes, it really has been 6 months!) was how on earth the wider VMware community was going to be able to “play” with EVO:RAIL. After all, it’s not something you download and play with as for a conventional evaluation period. The way I see it VMware has an unpaid army of evangelists in the community, and anything that assists them in explaining the advantages (and yes, disadvantages) of hyper-convergence, as well as to be able to talk confidently to their management about the appliance experience, has to be a benefit.
With that in mind I’ve been working hard to add more functionality to the current EVO:RAIL HOL that allows partners, employees and customers to do more and show more. The new HOL I’ve been working on is built on the solid foundations put there by my colleagues Wit Riewrangboonya, and William Lam. As ever in life we seldom achieve purely on our own, and we are almost always standing on the shoulders of other people’s work.
The new HOL will be battle tested at this year’s PEX event – and afterward will find its way on the publically facing site. Using it you will be able to carry out the new tasks including:
- Go through the workflow to add a 2nd appliance demonstrating EVO:RAIL auto-discovery and auto-scale-out functionality
- Emulate the failure of an individual ESXi host, and go through the workflow of adding a replacement node
- Experience the process of patching the EVO:RAIL software engine.
- Finally, for those people wanting to ‘brand’ the EVO:RAIL UI with logos of one our 9 Qualified EVO:RAIL Partner (QEPs) there’s small script that enables the logo prior to starting off the configuration which is called logos.bat held in the C:\EVO:RAIL directory in the Control Center desktop
With the new lab being made available – it now had new URL listed below. Please to take when you can – and you can let me know directly what you think and your experiences. EVO:RAIL is physical appliance and deploying the VMware software stack at quite a primary level – so its often tricky to get the virtual and physical worlds to be the same – so any feedback on improving it and making the experience more realistic will be warmly recieved!!!