Many of our courses include hands-on labs. When you're taking a course with a live instructor, the accompanying lab environment is automatically provided to you, with no action needed from you to request it.
However, when you're taking a self-paced course that includes a lab, you actually have access to that course for 12 months, and we don't fire up the lab environment that goes with it until you tell us that you're ready to start working on the lab exercises. This helps to preserve resources and keeps the cost of our courses as low as possible.
When you are ready to start the lab portion of your self-paced class, simply reach out to us following the instructions inside your on-demand course. Not in your course right now? Here's a handy link to our ticketing system, where we'll need you to tell us the name of the course you're taking and also which general region you're in (US, EMEA, or APAC) so that we can set your lab up on the closest possible server.
Give us a business day or so to provision the lab, though it often takes us less time than that. Once we provision the lab, you'll receive an email from Skytap, the platform that hosts our lab environments. That email will include a link for you to launch the lab. Inside Skytap, you'll find a copy of the lab exercises and also a copy of the Student Guide that accompanies that course.
Important: Once the lab has been launched, you'll have 20 hours of runtime across the next 4 weeks (28 days) to work through your lab exercises. When either the runtime or time limit has passed, the lab is automatically expunged from our system, and we cannot retrieve it. There is a timer running at the top of your lab environment, so you can always see how much time remains.
If you find, as you are working in your lab, that you are running out of time, please be aware that you are able to purchase additional lab time, but remember that we need to receive that request BEFORE your lab time has expired. The time allotted for you to work through the lab exercises for each course is more than enough, and your lab will automatically go into Suspend mode after 20 minutes of inactivity, to ensure as little time as possible is wasted.
If you have any questions about how this works, please contact us here. Happy learning!
