Wednesday 6 July 2011

I wonder what you're doing this Summer

During the summer, there’s downtime in organizations as many people are on vacation.  For some businesses this can also be a time when ‘business as usual’ offers slightly less stress and we can turn our attention to some of the background activities that enable the rest of the year to move forward successfully.

Like many people, I often see the summer as a time when I can do a bit of formal or self-training to keep my skills up to date.  As things slow down, it’s a good time to brush up on our skills in certain areas.  Sadly, formal training often has to take a back seat as work pressures these days just don’t allow for several days out of the office attending a course in a classroom. 

Some areas of learning don’t lend themselves that well to classroom-based training anyway.  I’ve always experienced problems with any non-product specific IT training I’ve had, especially capacity management training.  I find that I need to have fairly instant reinforcement of training through on-the-job usage of those skills, or quite simply, the memory fades over time and much of the training is lost. 

Capacity management particularly fits this bill for me.  You get some great tip or technique for tuning or sizing a system, but those little tips are the first things you forget as the classroom-based hands-on exercises are usually based around the larger more general issues.  Then of course there is capacity planning.  It’s fine to get taken through the theory and even a practical exercise re. building a capacity plan in the classroom.  Back at the office of course, it’s then usually several months before those predictive and business liaison skills are called on.  No matter how good the notes I scribble on to that iPad, it’s not the same as practicing the skills right after the training. 

To try to help you over these limitations of classroom-based training and use some of that summer time to good effect, Metron is presenting its first Summer School beginning July 12th 2011.  This year’s Summer School is around VMware Performance and Capacity Management.  This class is focused on giving the individual practical troubleshooting techniques to assist in monitoring their VMware environment.  There’s quite a bit of information out there and this set of classes is meant to assist in consolidating that information.  

There will be four one-hour sessions spread over an eight week elapsed period.  This means that you get the chance to go and practice the skills taught each week, before moving on to the next section of the course.  That immediate consolidation of learning aids retention of information a huge amount.  There’s the ability to replay a session if you can’t make the on-line event, which means it can fit in with even the busiest summer diaries.

From a technical perspective, the benefits in attending are:

  • Identify common performance and capacity issues with VMware
  • Implement a structured approach to resolving such issues
  • Understand and manage the interaction of key system components
  • See through issues masking the root cause of a problem and resolve that root cause

Even though the Summer School isn’t related to our own Athene software in any way, Athene clients can attend free. 
CMG users get a discount and even if you don’t qualify for either of those categories, it only costs $249 for all four sessions. 
This means the boss won’t come back from his holiday and find you’ve broken the budget.

We look forward to having you join us.  For more information, please go to:  http://metron-athene.com/training/summer_school/index.html

Charles Johnson

Principal Consultant

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