First off, let me point out that this is not a boot camp with a certification in mind. It’s a 4 day course given by Firefly Communications. Although I booked the course through Global Knowledge, I was told that they typically outsource their data center courses to Firefly. Works for me. As long as it is quality training, I don’t care if you outsource it to Elbonia. I am assuming they use the term “boot camp” because it is an end to end ACE class taught in just 4 days.
Which brings me to my first point. My company was able to use Cisco Learning Credits to pay for this class. At 30 credits, that translates to $3,000 US dollars for 4 days worth of training. Sitting in the class, I couldn’t help but notice people doing regular work while the instructor was going through his lecture. I realize most places are understaffed. Outages happen. Fires have to get put out. However, $3,000 for 4 days to me is a big deal. If you send your employees off to training that is critical/applicable for their job, LET THEM TRAIN! Leave them alone while they are there. Of course, that’s a 2 way street in that some employees need to learn to let go as well. The company will function without them for a few days. You can turn off “martyr” and “hero” mode for a couple of days. I am checking e-mail at night, but not being obsessive about it. I have very capable co-workers who can do anything and everything without my help.
Now, on to the actual class. Let me begin by commenting on the quality of instruction. I’ve been to plenty of poor classes in which someone was trying to shovel test material down your throat the whole time. I’ve also sat in several classes where the instructor was obviously out of their league and could not field questions from the crowd that weren’t covered on the vendor approved slide deck. That is simply not the case with Firefly. My instructor is very competent and when he hits the limit of his knowledge, he indicates that. So far, I think I have only seen 1 time out of the dozen or so questions he was hit with today in which that was the case. I guess that is what $3,000 a seat gets you.
It seems as if there is a fairly decent mix of people in this class. About a dozen or so in attendance. A fair amount of them are actually using the ACE 4710 appliance which I thought was rather interesting. Of course, most are using the standard ACE module. There are varying levels of experience with ACE as well. I was under the impression that I would be here mainly for the second half of the class, as I felt comfortable with the basics. Of course, just when you go and get comfortable, you realize how little you know. I learned a LOT today. Mainly, it was about things I never really bothered to dig into. You see, like most people, we probably only dig into the features we absolutely need right now. Maybe we plan on coming back and covering everything else at a later time, but I think that happens far less than we’d like it to. Some of the things we covered today that I was horribly deficient on were:
Resource Management – If you use multiple contexts, RM can prevent a single context from taking over the entire resources of the module. I don’t use this as it is currently not a concern, but good to know if things change!
HTTP Message Structure – 3 fields make up each HTTP message: Start/Request line(includes the METHOD), Header fields, and Body(which is optional)
ACE 4710 appliance – I don’t use it and never have. However, it does do a few things the module does not mainly centered around application acceleration. We have not covered that exhaustively yet, but I will take good notes when we do.
There were other things covered in which I was glad to get a decent refresher. The main one being TCP sequence numbers. They are always a bit confusing to me if I don’t study them on a fairly regular basis. Although you weren’t there with me in class today, you can read this post by Jeremy Stretch which talks about TCP sequencing. He even uses nice graphics!
We ended the day doing a pretty simple lab in which we created some contexts and messed around with resource management to see if we could oversubscribe the module in terms of CPU, memory, etc in regards to other contexts. Overall, it was a really good first day. I am eagerly anticipating what tomorrow will be like. It is also good to be taught by someone who actually helped develop the slide deck the course is taught from. He was able to add funny little details about how he created this drawing or that. It’s always nice to have someone teach who has a great sense of humor. So far, I give the Firefly ACE boot camp 2 thumbs up!
I am hoping to get a wee bit more technical in the following posts regarding ACE boot camp as the remaining days will REALLY focus on load balancing. Who knows? I might even post a graphic or two! Shocking isn’t it?