Some years ago, being an IT professional needing to practice your trade was going to cost you a lot. To practice ordinary how to network two laptops, you needed two laptops. Haha.

Try to imagine trying to scale that to 3 or 4 laptops. Where would you get money to buy 3 or 4 laptops? Okay maybe you said let me borrow laptops from my friends and use it to practice, will they give it? No they didn't.

To network computers, you also needed hubs, or switches, and even in some cases routers, and internet connection. All these were difficult to achieve.

Today, that problem still exists, but the solution is called Virtual Machines. With virtualization came the ability to have one laptop of your own, that has enough processor power, enough RAM, and enough storage. Through virtualization technology you can now have 3 other computers in your laptop that you can network and practice with.

But there was another problem again. You needed to know the step by step of how to network, configure, troubleshoot and administrate whatever you were studying or trying to practice. The solution is Microsoft Hands-On Labs.

Today, due to the pandemic, the prices of these labs have come down drastically. If you need to see a demonstration of how these labs work, and how you can access them, visit https://joancross.net/courses

Or you can chat me up on WhatsApp on +2348061572794 for a free test drive.

Here are some screenshots of how the labs environment look like.