In a move that I have to say that I did not see coming (but then I think no-one did) VMUG recently announced that subscribers to their VMUG Advantage initiative would also receive EVALExperience licenses for a number of vSphere related products meaning that these products are now available for use with a 365 day license which you can renew as long as you maintain your VMUG Advantage subscription .

As a home labber faced with rebuilds after 30-60 days, this is a godsend, I can now seriously think about downloading a product, installing, blogging and messing about in my own sweet time, rather than not bothering since I would imagine that I would blow through the license before I got much out of it.

The products that are licensed are;
•VMware vCenter Server™ 5 Standalone for vSphere 5
•VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ Enterprise Plus
•VMware vCloud Suite® Standard
•VMware vRealize™ Operations Insight™
•VMware vRealize Operations™ 6 Enterprise
•VMware vRealize Log Insight™
•VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon®
•VMware Horizon® Advanced Edition
•VMware Virtual SAN™
I was already a VMUG advantage subscriber and had benefitted from reduced prices on VMworld, reduced price on exams, access to VMworld content etc. but this is going to make the whole VMUG Advantage thing less of a nice to have, more of a must have. VMUG are already reporting a huge upsurge in VMUG Advantage purchases since the EVALExperience announcement in the middle of January, so this is good news for everyone. I include hardware resellers in this, since it looks like I may have to update the home lab.

The list of products is set to grow in future and will also be updated as the vSphere 6.0 related code is released. There has already been a license update as the first set of licenses didn’t cover enough vSphere licenses to run VSAN (Oops). At least this shows that quick updates are possible!

I think that this is a great move, the community had been crying out for something like this ever since the sad loss of VMTN subscriptions years ago, it can only help more people to become VMware advocates.