VMUG Advantage: Essential Homelab Purchase

I’ve just purchased the Advantage membership of MVware User Group (VMUG, www.vmug.com), and first impressions are that it really is great value for money. Whether you’re running a work test environment, homelab for learning/exams, or just want to run an extended trial of VMware’s products, VMug Advanrage seems like an essential purchase.

In brief, VMUG is a community for VMware users, that offers a free and paid membership plan. As part of the free plan, you get access to the webcasts, educational resources, community meetings/UserCons etc.

The Advantage paid membership is what really attracted me though; besides additional training/exam discounts, you also get 365-day trial keys for just about every VMware product available. Below is the list of downloads after you’ve logged in:

For me, this is really fantastic, and was an easy sell to the IT Director to pay the €200 annual fee (€180 with a discount code VMWORLD19).

Even without having this paid for it, it’s still a no-brainer to purchase personally in my opinion. Sure, there’s 60-day trials for most (if not all) of the above products, and you can probably approach your reseller for even longer trial keys, but a rolling 365-day trial is absolutely perfect for those of us running VMware on our home labs.

Hopefully there’s no gotchas with all this, but having just updated my expired homelab vCenter, it’s so far so good.