Looking for your Home Lab Licenses to run either vSphere Standard Edition or VCF? This article should give you what you need to know to make this happen.
Key Steps to Get Your Home Lab Licences for vSphere Standard Edition or VCF
- Step 1: Understand your options. Depending on your needs and certifications there are different options to your free Home Lab Licenses.
- Step 2: Sign up for VMUG Advantage to qualify for VCF, get discounted rates on certifications, & enable multi-year extensions.
- Step 3: Sign up for and take your certification exam – don’t miss the great study resources available through VMware {code}
- Step 4: After you have your completion certificate, head to the Broadcom Certification License Portal to choose your licenses.
- Step 5: Select and Download your licenses and get started!
Step 1. Understanding your options
Option 1: Get vSphere Standard Edition 32 cores for 1 year: Pass one of the following VCP certification exams
- VCP-VVF (admin/architect)
- VCP-VCF (admin/architect)
Option 2: Get VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 128 cores for 3 years: Purchase & Maintain VMUG Advantage, pass the following VCP certification exam.
Notes:
- You can purchase your VMUG Advantage after you pass your VCP-VCF and it will upgrade your license. But it will not extend your time before the license expires. The license date is tied to your exam pass date.It makes sense to purchase VMUG advantage to save the 50% off your VCP-VCF exam fee, then take the exam, pass and get your full VCF license.
- The license is a Personal Use license only, which means you are not allowed to use this license for work environments of any kind. It’s for learning and experimentation/trial and error. Personal use is for “Personal Use”.
- Broadcom Employees will not be able to get licenses from this program, they are eligible to receive employee 1 year licenses from the employee license program.
Step 2. Purchasing your VMUG Advantage Membership
- Visit the VMUG.com/advantage website and purchase your annual membership which comes with multiple advantages, and importantly comes with the VCP-VCF license offering.
- You will need a VMUG account, they are free. Make sure you use the email address you plan on using to get your certification at broadcom.com, the email addresses must be the same so that your certification and VMUG Advantage Membership can be linked.
- Notes:
- If you have an existing VMUG account (Login email address) and it’s not the same as your Broadcom certification email address, you can send email to advantage@vmug.com, and request they change your email address on your account.
- To change your broadcom support email address you can send a request to one of the following email addresses depending on what area of the world you work in:
- AMER: Americas.Education@broadcom.com
- EMEA: emea.education@broadcom.com
- APJ: apj.education@broadcom.com
Step 3. Sign up and take your VCP-VCF/VCP-VVF Exam
You will need a broadcom.com support login in order to signup for your exam, you can visit the following URL to signup for your exam. Don’t forget to use your VMUG Advantage discount code to get 50% off your exam.
There is a great VMware {code} training track consisting of several recorded sessions that help you study and pass your VCP-VCF certification.
When you are ready to take your certification exam, visit the education portal.
Step 5. You will receive your completion certificate in email, check it for a link to the Broadcom Certification License Portal.
- The email will link you to the Broadcom Certification License Portal
- Visit the support certificate URL listed above and login using the email address you used to take your exam.
Step 6. You will see the list of available product licenses
- You will see they are not requested, when you first visit the page, you will need to click on the not requested icon in the top right corner of each product listed to request the award.
- Those who have purchased VMUG Advantage and passed the VCP-VCF certification will see the VCF-CLD-FND-5 128 license panel:
- Those who have not purchased VMUG advantage, or only passed the VCP-VVF certification will see VCF-VSP-STD-8 32 license panel.
- The icon in the top right will then be updated with the word “pending”, your award will be processed which can take several hours before you will receive an email indicating your purchase has been processed.
- After you receive the email, it will take 4-6 more hours before your license is available for download.
Step 7. Download your license keys and product images
After receiving your order email, and then after 4-6 hours, visit the portal and you will see two images in the bottom right corner of your products. The images are for the license keys and download area. Select each to get your license keys and downloads of the products.
- Helpful Hint: People have reported not noticing the small “ribbon” icon, which is a popup with your keys. They see the download icon, which takes you off this page to downloads and then wonder where to get their keys. Get your keys first by clicking on the ribbon icon in the lower right corner before selecting the download icon.
Bonus Step: Engage with your VMUG chapter community.
You can join VMUG.com and attend your chapter meetings to learn how to install the full VCF suite on a $800.00 NUC, for a low cost, low power, quiet home lab environment. You can read about the NUC options on William Lams blog where he covers the latest NUC which can run the VCF stack. See you at your next VMUG chapter meeting. You can also register for Connect in St Louis April 23th-25th and see William present the latest hardware, and join William’s AMA.
