Frederic Passeron
Solution Architect : HPE Developer Program (WW Experience Studio)
Brand new Cadillac
There’s always more than one way to learn and the more methods you have, the better. Our HPE Developer Community Workshops-on-Demand are a great way to discover new technologies. They’re free, available 24/7, and enjoyable enough to have attracted nearly 4000 users! But there’s another program available and we want to share that with you, too.
Announced this past summer at HPE Discover 2022 in Las Vegas, HPE GreenLake Test Drive enables customers to gain hands-on experience with the platform and the solutions available through it, such as HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise. The exercises found in the Test Drive are persona-driven, enabling customers from different parts of an organization understand how to realize value from our solutions.
The exercises are targeted towards both non-technical and technical personas. Customers get a similar experience as found in the HPE Developer Workshops-on-Demand; including the ability to use the Test Drive for a limited-time, at no-cost, and with no-obligation.
Navigating Test Drives
The Test Drive modules can be sorted by Category, Use Case, and Role.
The Category filter provides the ability to hone in on different technologies; from Containers to Private Cloud and Virtualization. The Use Case filter addresses real-life uses cases related to the different roles listed. Finally, the Role filter allows a persona-driven selection. A DevOps engineer or a developer can be checked to filter exercises specifically relevant to their job and there are actually quite a few options in this area.
You’ll have fun, fun, fun
You’ll want to check out the HPE GreenLake Test Drive because:
- It allows you to explore what and how to deploy in an HPE GreenLake environment
- It provides a simple and easy way for you to play with and get a feel for it
- There is no cost and no obligation
- You can validate specific use cases
- You will be working with production/GA solutions—You will get what you have tried
Test Drives help eliminate the fear you may have in terms of investment from a resource, time, and effort perspective. They are time bound, available at no cost, and offered on a no-obligation basis. As Test Drives are easily accessible, the concerns about shipping solutions to a customer’s location are also removed.
You can opt for a self-service Test Drive or a Hosted experience, depending upon where you are in the problem identification, solution exploration, or requirements building stage.
Test Drive: A self-service environment where customers take one or more 15–120-minute HPE GreenLake platform services for a Test Drive.
Hosted: HPE sets up a trial experience in an HPE facility (nothing is shipped to the customer). HPE sets up the customer’s account on the HPE GreenLake platform to test out their specific use cases and scenarios. The customer can test their workloads/applications and additional ecosystem integrations.
In this blog post, I will describe the Test Drive experience. The Hosted trial is completely different. Keep your eyes posted on the HPE Developer blog for a future post regarding Hosted trials.
Start your engine!
Taking a Test Drive is similar to how one engages with a Workshop-on-Demand. You register, and then you run the exercise. The only important prerequisite is to have a HPE My Account. If you do not already have one, it’s very easy. Just go to testdrive.greenlake.hpe.com and when the below screen comes up, click on Sign up at the bottom.
Once you’re signed into the Test Drive page, filter the selection by choosing your desired persona, categories, and use cases. You can then click on one of the tiles to start a Test Drive.
The selected Test Drive page will provide you with information about the time allocated, an abstract and the objective of the exercise, as shown above.
When you are ready, simply click Start Test Drive. This kicks in automation that configures the necessary resources in an HPE GreenLake trial tenant. Your account will be added to the tenant along with the proper RBAC (Role Based Access Configuration) policies.
A few minutes later, you’ll access the detailed instructions for the module. Read through them and perform the necessary steps.
When everything is ready, you will log into the tenant and run through the exercises.
At the end of the Test Drive, the environment is wiped out and you can move on to another use case.
Life is a highway
Quoting Adan DuVander, “Knowledge is the developer currency.” This concept truly applies to this new program from the HPE GreenLake Test Drive team and what one learns from experience.
The HPE Developer Community team is currently working with the HPE Test Drive team to provide additional tiles in the HPE GreenLake Test Drive catalog. Many of the use cases will come from those that we found have resonated well with our Workshop-on-Demand customers.
So, why not give it a try? It’s right here, ready to be tested!
Don’t forget, you can always find other tutorials and articles on HPE GreenLake on the HPE Developer blog. The HPE Developer Community team will continue to add more HPE GreenLake focused workshops in its Workshop-on-Demand catalog, in addition to the existing Introduction to Virtual Machine Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform and HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Enterprise.
