Just in case we didn't have the most awesome labs already......
Over the summer things quieten down a little in the world of MCM and we get a chance to work on updates to the program, exams and labs. Over the past few months OCS MCM has joined the other MCM programs and moved its exams online. Previously I had to hand mark each paper and this was a painfully time consuming process and meant delays in getting results back to candidates. It also made retakes difficult as folks would need to travel to Redmond to retake a specific written exam. I'm glad to say that this is now a thing of the past and all three exams are available through the Prometric system (although not for public consumption – you still have to attend to get to take the exam). This has enabled lots of folks around the world to retake exams and get them closer to certification. Even the qual lab is now online and so it is possible to retake any of the four tests required for MCM from a remote location. Another summer project has been to update the core labs. Every single candidate that has attended so far has been blown away by the lab environment we have for the program. Well, we've not rested on our laurels and along with sorting out a variety of bug fixes we have introduced two completely new sets of infrastructure to enable several new lab scenarios. These include a second edge infrastructure and a second pool. We are now able to analyse in detail behaviours with inter pool communications, signalling/media flows in a distributed edge scenario and cross pool DR. Integrating these has taken a fair amount of work but we are in final testing now and the team has done a great job. This extension to the lab brings the total number of virtual machines in each students ‘pod’ to 33. We are certainly now at the top limit of what the host machines can handle comfortably. This will be the last update that we do to the lab before we rebuild for Wave 14 but the work we’ve done has given us some great insight into potential new scenarios we will build into that environment.
For those of you attending forthcoming rotations the labs are looking better than ever! Enjoy.
Adrian