New Year offer: practice 1 week for your CCNA for $9

Would you like to practice for your CCNA on the same simulator used by training centers like Kaplan / Selftest?

http://www.selftestsoftware.com/gen.aspx?pn=p00555&pf=page

We have a limited New Year promotion: rent your own MIMIC Virtual Lab Cloud CCNA practice lab for less than half the regular price: $9 for one week. Valid until Monday January 9, 2012 only on our Facebook wall

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/CCNA-Lab-Simulation/155028001250199

Have a prosperous 2012!

Gambit Communications Receives International Green Apple Award - Winner - Fourth Year in a Row

MIMIC Simulator Simulates 50,000 Devices in One Machine, Saving Electricity Requirements By 90 Percent

Nashua, NH - November 29, 2011 -- Gambit Communications, a leading provider of network simulation tools, has been announced as a winner of the prestigious International Green Apple Environment Award in The Green Organisation's international campaign to find the world's greenest companies. The Award was in recognition of Gambit's environmentally friendly product - MIMIC Simulator, that creates a greener environment by simulating 50,000 networking and storage devices in one machine.

The trophy was presented by The Green Organisation at 18th annual international awards ceremony at the House of Commons, London on Monday, November 14th. This is the forth time in a row that Gambit was honored with the award. Gambit competed against more than 500 other nominations.

The Green Apple Awards are presented annually in recognition of companies, councils and communities carrying out projects that are environmentally friendly; there were 500 nominations this year. Other winners include Coca-Cola, BP, Ford and McDonalds. 


More details at http://www.gambitcomm.com/site/pr/mimic_Green_Apple_award_PR_11.htm

Are you ready for the CCNA exam?

Determine in a couple of minutes whether there is a missing skill that could prevent
you from passing the CCNA certification exam. Your only investment is a couple of clicks.
No extraneous software to install or configure, connect to the lab in under one minute.
.
MIMIC Virtual Lab CCNA at http://www.gambitcomm.com/live has a list
of challenges to test your skills. For example:

Enable IPv6 connectivity between router1 and router2 over the serial interface connecting
them, so that you can ping each other's IPv6 address.

Use IPv6 subnet 2001:A10:1:10::/64 for this exercise. What are the IOS commands necessary
to accomplish this? Obviously, your last command would be a successful ping command.

Anatomy of a virtual network management training appliance

Overview

Traditionally, providing a training lab for network management software meant setting up a physical environment featuring the desired variety of networking equipment to cover the training curriculum. Furthermore, certain training scenarios required complicated setup, and required travel to a training site, or time-sharing of central facilities. These limitations made such training cost prohibitive, both for the provider and student, resulting in less than adequate training.

With the advent of ubiquitous virtual machines (VMs) and network simulation, training labs can be provisioned cost-effectively by implementing virtual training appliances on either public or private clouds. Bundling the management app and MIMIC Simulator on a VM image, allows the training provider to instantiate as many training labs as needed at any point in time, and for the student to access the training environment over the Internet whenever and as long as needed.

Benefits of cloud based training

Besides the obvious benefits of reduced customer support, higher customer satisfaction and more customer loyalty (thus, repeat business), here are some additional advantages of appliance-based training:

• On-demand pre-sales training can be used for application evaluation. With a larger variety of scenarios, training can be tailored to the customers needs.

• Partner training reduces the sales cycle and improves closing rate by better demonstrating features that specifically solve customer requirements

Implementation

MIMIC Simulator is a software suite including SNMP simulation designed to accurately create virtual environments to interoperate with network management applications. This simulator is already used in a multi-tenant cloud offering called MIMIC Virtual Lab Cloud, with on-demand training pods for Cisco CCNA training from training houses like Kaplan IT/Transcender. This offering leverages the Cisco IOS simulation features of MIMIC toward low-cost CCNA training. OEMs layer their own training curriculum on top of the virtual lab.

The virtual training appliance can easily be implemented as an on-demand, single-tenant offering. Similarly to traditional software installations, the network management application is installed in a VM along with MIMIC Simulator. The simulator transparently provides a scalable, dynamic network environment to be managed by the application. The student does not even need to know what is running behind the scenes.

Setting up a training environment and all feature-specific scenarios can be a significant task. It can be alleviated by leveraging the work of the engineering folks. R&D and Quality Assurance departments already test network management applications against MIMIC Simulator. They setup the simulator to provide predictable, repeatable, regressionable scenarios that run the management software through its paces. Those scenarios can be adapted for training.

An extra customization adds a simple training scaffold to provide the student a user-friendly choice of scenarios to train on. Each scenario configures the simulator to create a particular network configuration and traffic patterns to impact the management application. For example, a faulty configuration can be simulated to train troubleshooting procedures.

Once a snapshot of this VM is saved, any number of independent instances can be provisioned for the required training periods. The cloud framework isolates each of the VMs from each other, preventing them from impacting each other.

Summary

A combination of MIMIC Simulator and network management application bundled on a virtual machine provides cost-effective, on-demand training tailored to customer needs. Deploying this appliance on the public cloud scales the training resources at incremental and predictable cost.

Contact Gambit’s support to help you setup a virtual appliance for your training.

MIMIC SNMP Simulator 11.30 interoperability testing

Screenshots below show SNMP simulation activity on virtual machines running
the MEPIS 11.0 and openSuSE 11.4 LXDE flavors of Linux.

MIMIC SNMP Simulator 11.30 performance for 50,000 agents

We have run our standard performance tests on our V40z quad dual-core
server with 32GB RAM running Fedora 13, and there is no performance
degradation for 50,000 active agents.

MIMIC Simulator rent-to-own program

You asked for it and we listened.

In order to alleviate the up-front cost of using MIMIC SNMP Simulator
software in these tough economic times, we are announcing a rental program
with option to acquire the software: rent MIMIC on a monthly basis for 10%
of the cost of the software, and have the option to acquire the software
at the end of 10 months.


MIMIC allows you to test the scalability of your application against 50,000
devices and all possible pathological network scenarios.

This program gives you the most advantages: like a lay-away program it
allows you to spread payments over time, except you get the benefits of
the product before completing the payment plan. This offer is available
for a limited time only.

For details, please visit http://www.gambitcomm.com .