Resource Library

A major challenge of problem determination is dealing with unanticipated problems. It is much like detective work: finding clues, making educated guesses, verifying suspicions, and other considerations. An ideal strategy for problem prevention is to monitor the system regularly. Use the strategies outlined in this paper to minimize downtime and detective work so you can maximize performance.

CompTIA has raised the bar for Network+ candidates. The new certification exam has significant changes to the five "domains" or knowledge areas with new content related to security, cloud, data-center and operational concerns and troubleshooting. There is also a greater emphasis on wireless networking and VoIP. Use this white paper to help you gain an overview of what's new and what's different.

Red Hat Taste of Training - JB248

Red Hat Taste of Training - JB348

In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge course director Brian Egler will examine key new features of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 that demonstrate how it provides automatic end-to-end security, seamless generation of business analytics and elastic integration of data in the cloud.

With Microsoft SQL Server 2016, you can distribute your data to the cloud using the Stretch Database feature to improve local access while allowing cloud access to large amounts of historical data. You can also provide transparent end-to-end security using Always Encrypted technology and track changes automatically through temporal data. Download this white paper to learn why these features and more make SQL Server 2016 Microsoft's most important release to date.

Despite advances in security, hackers continue to break through network defenses. In this hour-long webinar, network security specialist Catherine Paquet will examine the favorite methods and targets of hackers and will introduce you to the different categories of security technologies. In this foundational presentation, you will learn about the benefits of security solutions such as firewalls, VPNs, IPS, identity services and BYOD.

Change is the order of the day, and if anything, the pace of business and technology change is accelerating. The business and customers are looking to IT service providers to be more responsive, delivering more frequent service changes with higher quality-resulting in services that deliver more value to the business. In order to continue to be relevant and of high value, ITIL must continue to benefit from other complementary best-practices for IT. DevOps, an approach that encourages improved communication, collaboration, and teamwork across development and operations, can have a positive influence in improving ITIL processes across the service life-cycle.

Use cases are an effective and widely used technique for eliciting software requirements. In this hour-long webinar, software development and process improvement expert Karl E. Wiegers will introduce you to a practical and straightforward use cases approach to requirements elicitation. You will learn how to focus on the goals that users have with a system, rather than emphasize system functionality.

When properly utilized, VLANs and trunks provide flexibility, stability and ease of troubleshooting. This paper provides technical details about VLANs and trunks, along with design options at a basic to intermediate level. Recommendations and commands are included throughout.

In this paper, we explore the basic usage of PowerShell in the pursuit of automating the management of Hyper-V deployments. This paper is targeted to IT professionals who have been "GUI-bound" to their management interfaces and have been working with or are embarking on the journey of Hyper-V administration. We'll explore the usage of Hyper-V specific cmdlets with the intent of ultimately being able to include multiple cmdlets in a "script" to allow for pushing one button and accomplishing the combined actions of many multiple mouse clicks in the GUI. No more repetitive tasks!

Switches play a vital role in moving data from one device to another. Specifically, switches greatly improve network performance, compared to hubs, by providing dedicated bandwidth to each end device, supporting full-duplex connectivity, utilizing the MAC address table to make forwarding decisions, and utilizing ASICs and CAM tables to increase the rate at which frames can be processed.

Interested in SharePoint 2013 developer training?  Learn from SharePoint instructor Tracy Wallace, if you're ready and which SharePoint 2013 developer class you should take.

When we learn a concept for the first time, the newness of it tends to become embedded with the learning process. We remember the new idea's significance and forever after remember it as new. The initial impact of a discovery can prevent the concept from aging. At the same time, we realize how quickly technology advances. Is it time to evolve your expertise?

Nowadays, you can read weekly articles about security attacks and stolen data. Even leading companies and organizations are victims of cybercrime. Attacks can include breaches at three levels: the physical level, which includes social engineering, system and network and applications (e.g., web and mobile). In this complimentary webinar, you will discover the benefits of using automated solutions to detect application vulnerabilities, provide steps to remediate them and avoid costly compliance violation.

This paper covers the configuration of IP Multicast with Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) including the basics of Multicast with the Group Encrypted Transport VPN (GETVPN).

The first big push toward implementation of IPv6 was mobile devices. Now, one of the driving forces is the Internet of Things. As the name implies, this means everything, including machine to machine communication (M2M).

Like it or not, Internet of Things (IoT) is upon us. There are a number of factors that will impact its adoption rate, and the inevitable privacy (or lack of) discussions will likely happen sooner than later. This is going to change the world as we know it, in many cases for the better. But we will need to keep an eye on the extent to which it invades our personal lives if it is going to be the positive force it has the potential to be.

One of the most significant new features in Microsoft Windows Server 2012 is the Hyper-V Replica (HVR) capability. Whether you are considering this for your own organization or just prepping for your Windows Server 2012 MCSA, this white paper presents the essentials of deploying this disaster recovery feature.

The process of learning how to subnet IP addresses begins with understanding binary numbers and decimal conversions along with the basic structure of IPv4 addresses. This paper focuses on the mathematics of binary numbering and IP address structure.

If you're running SharePoint 2010, learn how SharePoint 2013 is different and what you'll need to learn to deploy it effectively.

The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a powerful tool for managing storage on Linux servers. This video provides an overview of how LVM works and explores several ways that LVM makes storage management easier and more flexible. Examples include how to expand storage capacity on the fly using LVM and resize2fs, and how to migrate data from local storage to a storage area network (SAN) without downtime using pvmove.

Often, we don't have time to learn the reasons behind the standards we use. But learning what instigated a standard goes a long way toward not only understanding its importance, but also more easily and effectively applying it in your workplace. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor Keith Sorn will discuss common networking standards and explain how they were determined and why they are relevant. He will fill you in on things like why it's important to use proper color-coding standards when making cable and why the length limitations on wired cable are essential. He will also explain new standards, such as power over fiber.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is gaining momentum along with Software-Defined Networking (SDN). This paper examines the history of NFV and explores the prospects for networking to gradually evolve from a hardware-centric approach to a software-driven model. It concludes with an examination of future market implications and how NFV can help organizations to achieve their goals.

With Forrester Research declaring "Waterfall processes have become obstacles to speed, quality and predictability," and more than 85% of CIO's surveyed by CIO Magazine using or planning to pursue Agile practices in 2014, this one-hour webinar will explore the basics of Agile and why so many organizations are adopting Agile methods.

Many people believe that cloud computing requires server (or desktop) virtualization. But does it? We will look at using virtualization without cloud computing, cloud computing without virtualization, and then look at using both together. In each case, we'll look at where each deployment might be most useful, some use cases for it and some limitations.

Cloud computing enables development teams to get applications into production faster. IT Service Management (ITSM) leaders must adopt new strategies and change existing processes or risk becoming a barrier to success. Cloud computing requires DevOps-the blending of development and operations with the goal of accelerating time-to-market and reducing time-to-value. The good news is that ITIL® is uniquely positioned to accelerate DevOps, but it requires changes to existing ITSM processes.

After a review of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and its close cousin Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), this white paper addresses three main deployment scenarios: SDN without deploying cloud computing, cloud computing without deploying SDN, and deploying cloud computing in conjunction with SDN. We'll look at use cases, when the approach makes sense, and any applicable limitations.

Join Microsoft SQL Server expert Brian Egler for an hour-long webinar covering the key features and updates in the upcoming release of Microsoft SQL Server 2014! You will get a thorough review, along with demonstrations, of how SQL Server 2014 provides substantial improvements in performance, manageability, and availability that will make your job easier.

In 2013, VMware announced VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), which is VMware's native version of Software Defined Storage (SDS). It is simple, easy to setup and managed by user-defined policies. This paper explains VSAN, its basic requirements and how it works.

The technologies examined reduce operational expenses (OpEx), not capital expenses (CapEx) that has traditionally been the focus of virtualization. Many companies implemented virtualization with the goal of saving money in the form of fewer servers to buy with a side benefit of reducing the footprint of the servers and lowering the required power and cooling. Most of the savings were in capital, but do not expect the same with many of the technologies listed here, because some may even require some additional capital expenditures, at least for software, in order to save on the day-to-day operations of IT. The bigger cost in running an IT department is in the OpEx category anyway, so savings there are recurring.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers increased agility, developer productivity, pay-as-you-go pricing and overall cost savings. But you might wonder where to start, what pitfalls exist and how can you avoid them? How can you best save time and money? Learn what you need to know and where to start before launching an AWS-hosted service.

Your Microsoft SQL Server database often contains the most valuable information in your organization. Get tips for securing it properly and effectively in this free, information-packed webinar with Microsoft SQL Server expert Gidget Pryor. In just an hour, Gidget will demonstrate the layered security approach used by SQL Server. She will step you through the process and best practices of setting up logins, users, roles, schemas, and permissions, and she will review the security model changes that have taken place from SQL Server 2005 through SQL Server 2012. She will also review SQL Server 2012 training and certifications.

Database Management Systems (DBMS) have been monolithic structures with their own dedicated hardware, storage arrays, and consoles. Amazon Web Services (AWS) realized that while each company can use unique methods of collecting and using data, the actual processes of building the management infrastructure are almost always the same. AWS remedies DBMS problems with its Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

In this report, I've reviewed the 15 most popular certifications according to our more than 12,000 North American respondents to our annual IT Skills and Salary Survey. For each certification, you'll find a brief description, the average salary, and some insight into why it is popular.

Organizations are moving strongly toward Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) access, bringing outsourced activities back in-house, and finding ways to make use of the growing amounts of data flowing in from many new sources such as social media. These factors create an increasing shift in required and desired skills showing up in IT departments. Hiring and salary surveys, such as the 2014 IT Skills and Salary Survey from Global Knowledge and Windows IP Pro, TEKsystems' 2014 Annual IT Forecast, Foote Research Group's 2014 IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, Computerworld's annual Forecast survey, Robert Half Technology Survey, and information from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Futurestep, Mondo, GovLoop, and Dice have presented a developing picture of the IT skills that will be in demand in 2014. Here, in survey order, are the top 10 major skills and why they made the list.

Instructor John Harmon explains subnetting using binary numbers and decimal conversions.

Agile is a set of principles requiring a significant cultural shift, new paradigms in thinking and team organization. Over the years, Agile has become "productized" or in many cases "institutionalized", creating different flavours and levels of commitment among teams and organizations. Along the way, managers and team members have lost sight of Agile's principles and tried to enforce the use of certain tools and structure where they may not belong. In this one hour webinar, Perry McLeod will explain how tools such as use cases can be successful in an agile environment, provided the principles of agile are always active in the minds of the managers and the team members that are using them. Join Perry to determine whether or not making the cultural shift towards the use case method in an agile environment is the right move for you and your organization.

vSphere 5.5 is now available with myriad small improvements such as a faster Web Client, LACP, Autoscale and higher configuration maximums. In addition, there are changes coming such as VSAN, which may be ground-breaking in regard to VM storage of the future. Since the release of vSphere 5.5, they have not yet announced a change to the blueprint for the test. That being the case, I will say, for now, that the VCP-510 test should remain unchanged as well. My goal here is not to reeducate you on everything that you need to know for the test; instead, it is to point out the few changes that might apply in your company or organization.

Instructor John Harmon continues his explanation of subnetting by showing how subnet masks can be used to sub-divide networks.