# Practical Virtualisation # * **Date:** February 24-26, 2027 * **Location:** Kowloon, Hong Kong * **Host:** [APRICOT](https://2027.apricot.net/) * **Venue:** [Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC) Academy](https://www.hkpcacademy.org/)
## Workshop ##
* [Detailed Workshop Agenda](agenda.html) (includes links to presentations and schedule) * [Lab Access](http://ws.nsrc.org) (workshop only) * [Participants](participants.html) * [Instructors](instructors.html) * [Reference Materials](references.html) * [Sponsors](sponsors.html) * [Workshop Survey](https://nsrc.org/limesurvey/index.php/443165?lang=en) * Photos * [NSRC training videos](https://learn.nsrc.org)
## Workshop Description ## ### _Practical Virtualisation Workshop_ ### During this three-day technical workshop, we will discuss the aspects of selecting a local virtualisation solution for your organization. With the advent of current costs and pricing of commercial solutions, many organizations are looking for an open source solution that can grow and is mature enough to be usable. For this workshop we will focus on the Proxmox Hypervisor solution and go into detail on the various virtual solutions, including file systems that can be used with this solution. We include an overviews of many factors, such as cost, authentication, access control, application development and deployment strategies, data and risk management strategies, types of file systems available, and much more. Choosing and building a self-hosted virtualisation solution (and cloud solutions as well) requires understanding the aspects of all these issues. During three days, we will present, demonstrate, and complete labs on the virtualisation themes of: * **Hypervisors** (including Proxmox with KVM) * **Containers** (Proxmox/LXD system containers and Docker application containers) * **Block storage** (HDD and SSD, LVM, RAID, iSCSI) * **File storage** (consistency, ZFS, snapshots, and replication, NFS/CIFS) * **Distributed storage** (Scalable/Replicated. Ceph: rbd, cephfs) * **Application development** (CI/CD, containerisation, develop and test environments) * **Application deployment** (config mgmt e.g., ansible, stack management e.g., terraform, container management e.g., kubernetes) * **Data and risk management** (backups and recovery, monitoring, security) * **Choosing the right strategy for your organization:** cloud, self-hosting, or hybrid. Instructors have experience in these areas and will share their practical, hands-on experiences with both locally hosted and public cloud-based solutions. The workshop will use a virtual training platform where numerous concepts can be installed, configured, used, and reviewed hands-on to provide some practical experience with possible solutions you may be considering or already have. The goal of this workshop is to provide knowledge to assist with possible decisions you or your organization may be working towards, as well as share with everyone practical knowledge of solutions already implemented by the instructors and others in the class. Knowledge shared among peers greatly benefits in-person, interactive workshops like this one. By the end of this workshop, you should better understand possible solutions you could implement for your particular organizational needs, resources, and location. ## Pre-requisites ## __Required__ The one key pre-requisite is that participants should have some experience with a virtualisation environment, whether it be local with solutions like VMWare, VirtualBox, KVM, QEMU, libvirt, Hyper-V or with at least one cloud solution like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, or many others. __Technical Requirements__ Participants laptops/PCs must have: * A modern web browser installed (Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Opera/Edge) * Full administrator access to allow for installation of software or configuration of user access. * Windows-based laptops without Administrator access will not be able to complete all exercises. __Minimum Experience__ This workshop assumes a fundamental understanding of network protocols and terms, such as TCP/IP, ICMP, IPv4, IPv6 as well as an understanding of operating systems like Linux/Unix and/or Windows and how they are implemented and run. Introductory sessions in these areas are not part of the workshop. __Useful Experience__ After this here are some useful experiences to better give participants an idea of the type of system, security, and network topics that will be covered while discussing the many areas involved in a practical virtualisation workshop. * System administration or use of operating systems like Unix, Linux, Windows, and/or macOS (Unix). * Understanding of core functionality of operating system file systems. * Experience with or understanding of the concepts of RAID (RAID 1, 5, 1+0, etc.) * Understanding of TCP/IP as well IPv4 and IPv6 and basic understanding of how packets are routed on the Internet. * Understanding of the core concepts of encryption, why it is used, and how it is used, including the use of SSH and configuration of SSL. * Use of or knowledge about databases such as some form of SQL or other relational or non-relational data stores. * Programming experience of some kind and preferably some shell scripting or understanding of how shell scripts work. * Use of or understanding how an API works.
**Please note: participants are required to bring a laptop**