ESXLab.com Service Level Agreement for Lab Rental partners

Remote Lab Rental - Service Level Agreement

This Service Level Agreement applies to all remote lab rentals provided by ESXLab.com.


1. Remote Labs Instructor/Class Access

  • Remote Labs will be released to the instructor one or two days before of the class
  • Remote Labs will be taken back at 6pm (local time for the class) the last day of your class. Extensions will not be granted except in cases where the server pod was not available to the class 100% of the time, or if agreed to by us in advance
  • Remote Labs are available 24hrs/day during the class so students can review, practice, catch up, etc. from any location (not just the class room)
  • Remote Lab release will include both a Student Hand Out to guide students through the labs and an Instructor Notes document that provides instructors with insights and advice to aid in smooth lab use, demos and troubleshooting
  • Wherever possible, a free instructor machine will be provided with each Remote Lab rental. The purpose is to allow the instructor to practice and demo, and to be used by any student who encounters a server issue (e.g.: hardware failure) during the class
  • Our remote labs are accessed using MS Terminal Services (Remote Desktop Connection). WebEx Remote Access is available as an alternative access method (suitable for highly secure customer locations) and subject to extra cost

2. Infrastructure

  • We maintain a large inventory of spare parts (including spare servers) so that any physical server problem can be corrected quickly without the need to wait for replacement parts from HP
  • We conduct active server health monitoring and reporting. We are alerted to infrastructure server issues as soon as they occur. We take remedial action as soon as possible so as to minimize the possibility of issues impacting a class
  • We provision highly redundant infrastructure servers (redundant power supplies, redundant disk arrays, etc.) to minimize the likelihood of a component failure impacting a class
  • We house our servers in a class A datacenter. Our datacenter partner offers 4-way redundant cooling, a 500KVA backup diesel generator and redundant MPLS bonded high speed network connections to 3 separate Internet backbone providers

3. Support

We provide tiered support for all classes which includes:

  • Web for reporting problems (www.ESXLab.com/support). All trouble reports should be filed using this web site
  • We maintain a trouble ticketing / incident tracking system that is front ended by our web site. All support incidents are tacked through to completion using our trouble ticketing system
  • Instructors can prioritize their support requests (non-critical information request, low priority support request and high priority requests). Response times are 1 day, 4 hours and 1 hour respectively
  • We maintain on-call technicians for critical support requests. If an issue is significantly impacting a class, we will take direct phone calls and give these issues top priority
  • On call technicians are highly familiar with our lab environment and will assist with infrastructure and access issues

4. Fall Back Options

  • If a student server fails, the instructor can move the student to a free stand-by or the instructor use machine (usually included with each class)
  • If an infrastructure server fails, we will repair or replace it as quickly as possible. We maintain an inventory of complete spare servers just for this purpose. In most cases the repair can be completed in just a few hours from the incident occurring
  • If a complete student server pod fails, we can move the entire class to an unused server pod (we have 11 server pods). It will take us 4-6 hours to completely provision the new server pod for the class that has experience a failure. We do not have the ability to automatically complete student labs up to a pre-set lab number

5. Guarantees that Count for Something

  • Server pod outages of up to 4 hours do not incur a customer credit. Should this happen, we expect the instructor to lecture around the outage and make up lab time once the pod comes back on line
  • If a server pod is unavailable for more than 4 hours but less than 8 hours during scheduled class time, we will discount the full server pod rental cost by 25%
  • If a server pod is unavailable for more than 8 hours but less than 12 hours during scheduled class time, we will discount the full server pod rental cost by 50%
  • If a server pod is unavailable for more than 12 hours of class time then the full cost of the rental bill be waived. In addition a free server pod will be made available to the customer the following week (subject to availability) to provide free lab time to the students who were negatively impacted by the loss of server access
  • Note – we have *never* had to make good on any of our guarantees (as we have never experienced a server pod outage of even 2 hours of class time)

Last modified: 2012-09-24, 14:43

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