vTesseract







My name is Josh Atwell and I've been working in the IT industry exclusively since 2004. I've received my VCAP-DCD, VCAP-DCA, VCP3,4 certifications. I am currently working as a VMware administrator for a very large customer in a very large environment.

vTesseract is my personal presence for my thoughts, musings, and technical write-ups involving PowerShell, datacenter virtualization and other technologies I come across daily. The opinions and thoughts on this site are my own and are not endorsed or affiliated by my employer or anyone else. This is done on my own free time and all work is limited based on my time and available resources. Your comments, thoughts, opinions are welcome. Thanks for reading!

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Fri Nov 4

Bring Back VMTN Please!

Recently Mike Laverick brought up something I’ve been asking about for quite a while, Bringing back VMTN!  I believe it’s time to try and get some traction on this.  The problem involves two parts:

  • Accessibility of VMware applications for homelab/dev
     
  • Timeout on licenses require time-consuming reinstalls

The solution proposed by Mike is to bring back VMTN and I am a huge advocate of this.

I propose the following possible mechanisms and I think this is a great time to discuss this and push VMware to address the needs of their amazing user community!  Please provide your thoughts and feedback both here and on the following community forum:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1857571#1857571

UPDATE: Also please cast a vote at http://www.bringbackvmtn.com set up by Charles Gautreaux.  Thanks Charles!

2 Levels of VMTN

  • Admin 
  • Pro

No media, download only

VMTN Admin (~$200/year)

  • 1 year license Key. Renewable with new License Key
     
  • 1 vCenter Server Max
     
  • 3 ESXi Host Max
  • Enterprise Plus feature set available

VMTN Desktop Admin (~$200/year)

  • 1 year license key
  • 1 year license Key. Renewable with new License Key
  • 1 vCenter Server Max
  • 3 ESXi Host Max
  • 10-15 Desktop Max
  • Desktop License feature set available

VMTN Pro (~$400-$500/year)

  • 1 Year timer. Renewable with new license key
  • 4 vCenter Server Max
  • No ESXi Host Max
  • No Desktop Max
  • All VMware software available, including vCloud Director, Site Recovery Manager,
  • View, etc.

 May also be interesting to include:

VMTN Mobile(~200/year)

Horizon mobile applications once defined, released, and made GA.

Reward the community

  • Provide 1 year of VMTN Admin to people when they successfully complete a required VCP prerequisite courses (ICM, etc.)
  • Provide 2 year of VMTN Admin or Desktop to VCP recipients.  This could easily fit in the certification renewal cycles.
  • Provide Lifetime VMTN Pro subscription to VCAP and VCDX certification recipients.
  • Provide VMTN Pro to vExperts for each year they are selected vExpert
  • Provide Vouchers to VMUG for VMTN Admin to be used as giveaways.

 Other thoughts

  • Clearly all licenses not for Production
  • As long as someone stays current in the programs described there should be no rebuild required. 
  • Upgrade license keys should be made available with new versions.
  • Beta programs remains completely separate.
  • Perhaps provide email only support for VMTN Pro subscription holders for their non-prod environments with Support level defined lower so as to not impact critical customer queues.

These are a few of my thoughts.  Open to yours and please post on the community forum as mentioned before!

Links talking about VMTN Subscription Movement

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