learning the ropes for VM

Dan

Supreme [H]ardness
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May 23, 2012
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So i read the FAQ on this page and it was a awesome help understanding what VMs do and what they are useful for. Im currently furthing my education to get a better job in networking and obviously this is a important thing to learn. I downloaded VMware Workstation 12 player (free, I think this is the right version) to start. I'm also installing Ubuntu to get more education about *nix. Anything else that you guys think i should start messing around with that might be important?
 
You can also play around with VirtualBox as well. A mostly complete-ish personal VM setup.

VMWare Player, by itself, won't really do much for you without pre-existing VM appliances (the player doesn't allow you to create VMs).
 
Wow, they removed VM creation from Player?
I still have 4.0.4 build-744019 and it has that feature.

I keep recalling the amazing times when the 'server' edition was free (even for commercial use) and had snapshots and the like.

To the OP, to me a natural next step after installing Ubuntu would be setting up the VM server and Appliances on it (and not on Windows). Keep it simple like that. There's not much to learn, really. You learn when you google errors and apply weird workarounds. But if your Ubuntu install is sound and you stick to the official repositories you should be simply learning as you go.
When you have your VMs up and running under Ubuntu, you can try some fancy Linux stuff on them, like observing their behavior via tcpdump, learning to connect to them via VNC or SSH.
 
yea im having alot of fun so far actually. I was trying to figure out a actual usage that I could use and turn this PC into something important... I kinda drew a blank. I was having some minor issues trying to get windows and Ubuntu (2 separate locations across same LAN) to talk without looking anything up and for a quick fix I just threw teamviewer on the *nix machine so i can access it and transfer stuff. Once things got up and running it was 3 am and im still sick so i passed out. Going to play some more tonight :D
 
Job function wise a Network Engineer generally isn't going to really touch the VM environment at the Hypervisor or even the OS level. 99% of them will stay on their side and refer to the experts in each of these fields.

Not to discourage you on that front as it is a good skill to have - but as you mentioned you specifically wanted to do Networking your better off learning/doing the following.

1) Obtain Cisco Certification, its one of the few certs that people actually care about. Start with CCNA or CCENT depending on your current skill level. Many of the concepts you'll learn here will translate to other vendors hardware such as PAN, Juniper, ect...
2) Look for practice interviews for jobs your interested in.
3) Learn the lingo so that during interviews you can be part of the conversation.
4) Goto meetups in your area - your single best tool for getting a job in the industry will be connections, not peppering sites or recruiters with resumes.
 
Network Engineers 5 years ago probably didn't care about VM/Hypervisor but the future ones sure will. The lines are blurring very rapidly. Learn the network stuff. Learn Python. Learn some hypervisor stuff (VMware and Microsoft to start). And read up on Software Defined Networking...primarily Cisco ACI and VMware NSX so that you can understand the concepts and where the world is going.
 
Oh there's plenty to do with setups like that. You can have a GUI-less random Linux or just Windows recording stuff from your now forwarded camera - sort of home CCTV.
Maybe follow a tutorial to setup one of the many all-in-one database/webserver combos and have a VM running a database collecting messages from other devices in your network.
Think about what you actually need and would enjoy implementing.
 
You can also play around with VirtualBox as well. A mostly complete-ish personal VM setup.

VMWare Player, by itself, won't really do much for you without pre-existing VM appliances (the player doesn't allow you to create VMs).

You can create new VMs with Player. Its been a long time since you couldn't....
 
It's great the OP is trying to further his (eventual) career, but network admins don't touch VM infrastructure. And someone's comment about blurred lines is true, however in the opposite direction (virtualization engineers taking over networking jobs - i.e. VMware NSX).

OP - look into the different technology disciplines and find out what really interests you and try to soak up as much knowledge as possible. Certifications are good, but generally meaningless with no accompanied experience.
 
I use virtualbox for personal stuff but I like how VMware works much more, as it is much more streamlined.

When you move onto bigger and better things like ESXi though, you'll not miss the desktop virtualization options at all :D
 
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