LearnKey Blog
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
As companies grow they enevitably reach a point of saturation from which further growth is impossible. Whether it be a restaurant that suddenly needs a larger kitchen, or a grocery store that needs more parking, or even a website that just needs more bandwidth.
ITIL is a system of standardizing IT Infrastructure so that as companies grow and merge, and splinter and such, there infrastructure continues to function in a flexible, functional format. There is a standard set of instructions for how to deal with a problem, even down to the definition of what a problem is. There are in depth detailed methods of proper Configuration Managment, Change Management, Release Management…etc, all put together with the design of helping folks take care of things in the simplest most standardized way possible. Some of the provisions are meant to minimize downtime by ensuring that upgrades, backups, and virus scans are run at the least busy time of day (or over the weekend if possible).
The ITIL framework is simple enough to be applied to a single server environment, but it is designed to handle the complexity of companies that are growing from having an IT person to having an IT department to having an IT division etc…
Last Day for Poster Contest
If you remember back to Oct 14 (or just scroll down), we started a contest challenging our readers to come up with creative quotes to go on our new motivational posters.
Tomorrow (Nov 6) is the last day to offer suggestions for the poster. For those of you who may have been waiting to post your amazing quotes, make sure to get your suggestions in before the contest ends!
Click here to see the original post for contest details and to submit your quotes.
VMWare Certification Requirements
As stated on the product page for our Virtual Infrastructure Administrator Course; “This course will provide students with the knowledge needed to take the VMWare Certified Professional Exam VCP-310.” A question has been raised regarding a requirement VMware insists on for certification. It is required of candidates who wish to certify that they attend a VMware authorized course. Generally a VMware authorized course runs around $2,400-$2,900 and is a four day intensive hands on experience. Research shows that many students fail the exam after attending only this course.
Why then does VMWare require you to take a costly course with such a low success rate? The following excerpt from a vmware forum explains the reasoning behind this requirement :
Dreamweaver MX 2004
Adobe’s newest version of Dreamweaver is CS4 (Creative Suite), which is sometimes unofficially identified as the 10th version of Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver MX 2004 would be the 7th version, so it clearly is a little behind the times. If you don’t have a version of Dreamweaver by all means spend the $399 to get the new one. But if you are on a budget and happen to still be running your old Dreamweaver MX 2004, you may be happier with a $34.95 price to help you make the best use of the software you are already using.
The Art of Meetings
Not many people know this about me because I keep a real tight lid on it, but I hate meetings. I find them to be the single biggest impediment to my job. Nothing irritates me more than to have to stop working on a project so I can give a status report in a meeting about why the project is not done yet. “It’s because I am here talking about it instead of where I should be, doing it.”
How Great is Your IT Department?
For a tax preparer, it is an audit. For an athlete it’s the big game. For a chef, it’s a food critic. Many jobs have an ultimate test of strength and skill. A test to prove you have what it takes to continue doing what you do. For the IT department it is a server upgrade. What does it take for an IT department to change and move services to ensure that customers have adequent and reliable services when they need them? To the IT department it means they’ve got work ahead of them to do. Work that cannot fail, that has to be implemented in the best timeline, with a perfect failover in case it doesn’t work and the time set aside to make sure that the mission critical server upgrades are seemly transparent to implementation. This is when the super heroes really shine, where all the IT skills and learning pays off.
Windows Virtual Machine : What do you want to pretend today?
For children, a favorite game starts out with the magical words “Let’s pretend.” In fact almost every childhood game has an element of pretending to it. We can be astronauts, or generals commanding an army of plastic soldiers, or fairy princesses, whatever strikes our fancy. However, as we grow up and are reprogrammed at learning facilities we learn stuff like the scientific method, and the truth about Santa Claus, and we find that the capability for serious pretending fades into obscurity.
Luckily the folks at VMWare and Windows Virtual Machine, stubbornly held on. They said, “Let’s pretend we have 7 servers, even though we really only have one.” But instead of calling it “pretending” they called it “virtualization”. Then to really celebrate the concept, they built a variety of software packages, and developed an exam so that you can get certified in pretending virtualization.
Continue reading “Windows Virtual Machine : What do you want to pretend today?”
A+ 2009 Webisode #5
We are reaching the halfway point and Mike is beginning to wonder if he might have exceeded his reach.
Poster Contest
Scholarship!
For four years now Learnkey has offered a scholarship program to help worthy high school students achieve technical certifications for highly used software programs in the business world.
Only 3 schools will be chosen, and each school will be represented by 10 students. So this is the kind of scholarship where students should appeal to their schools to apply, as individual submissions will not be accepted.
Submissions must be in by Oct 14th, that gives you … two days. If that’s all you need to know, go submit your scholarship application now.
If more convincing is required, read this (straight from our newsletter)