VMware Home Lab Licensing

原文：VMware Home Lab Licensing — theDXT (Daniel Keer)

One of many advantages of passing the VCP-VCF (VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation) exam is that you can get access to home lab licensing. The license is valid for 365 days and can be used in non-production environments. An extra bonus is that if you also happen to have a VMUG Advantage subscription, you can renew the licensing for another 2 years.

In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to get your VMware home lab licensing after passing a VMware qualifying exam.

Why Home Lab Licensing Changed

For most of VMware's history, a home lab licence meant buying a VMUG Advantage subscription and applying the bundled evaluation keys, or simply running the 60-day evaluation over and over. The Broadcom acquisition changed the shape of that deal in two stages: the VMUG Advantage programme was reworked so its keys moved to a token-based activation model, and the certification path became a first-class route to legitimate non-production licensing. The result is that there are now two distinct doors into a legal home lab, and the certification route described here is the more generous of the two - a 365-day entitlement that, combined with a VMUG Advantage subscription, can be extended by a further two years.

Being precise about what the entitlement is not matters as much as what it is. It is non-production only, it is time-limited, and it is tied to the account that earned it. It cannot be used for customer workloads, resale, or the lab systems of an employer. Within those bounds, though, it is fully functional software - the same builds a customer runs, with the same upgrade and update paths - which is exactly what a certification lab needs.

What You Actually Get

After passing a qualifying exam, the entitlement covers the core of the modern VMware stack. At the time of writing the requestable licences after the VCP-VCF Admin exam are:

• VCF-CLD-FND - VMware Cloud Foundation, the bundle that carries vSphere, vSAN, NSX and the SDDC Manager management plane.
• ANS-FW-ATP-B - VMware vDefend Firewall with Advanced Threat Prevention (bundle).
• ANS-VMW-ALB - VMware Avi Load Balancer (Enterprise).

That combination is a remarkably complete lab: compute, software-defined storage, network virtualisation and security in one entitlement, which is why the certification route has become the standard advice for anyone building a lab to study for a higher-level VCF certification. The one caveat worth stating up front is that the entitlement is offered per qualifying exam, so plan your lab around what the exam's specific list includes rather than assuming every product is covered.

The Process

• To start, you need to pass the VCP-VCF exam. If you haven’t passed it yet, I’ve created the blog post, Passing VCP-VCF Admin Exam, which covers what I did to pass my VCP-VCF Admin exam.
• Once you pass the exam, you will receive an email letting you know that you are eligible for home lab licenses.

• Log in to the Broadcom Support portal https://support.broadcom.com/ using the same account you used to register for the VMware exam.

• Go to the following URL https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/alpine-certificate
• You will now see a list of the licenses you can request.

• Currently, the licenses you can request after passing the VCP-VCF Admin exam are:

  • VCF-CLD-FND is VMware Cloud Foundation
  • ANS-FW-ATP-B is VMware vDefend Firewall with Advanced Threat Prevention (Bundle)
  • ANS-VMW-ALB is VMware Avi Load Balancer (Enterprise)

• Click on Request License for each license you would like to request.

• Once you request a license, the status will change from Not Requested to Pending.

• Behind the scenes, Broadcom is processing everything. During the processing, you will get a few emails.
• The first email you will receive is similar to the standard email when you purchase a VMware product from Broadcom. Even though the email will list a Site ID, you can’t associate your account with it.

• The following email you receive will inform you that the software has been fulfilled. However, you can’t access your licenses just yet.

• If you wait about one more hour, when you check the VCP Certification Licenses page, you will see that the licenses now have an expiry date along with a download icon and a license icon.

~~Currently, the product keys you get access to are for VCF 8. Broadcom has an ongoing project to enable access to VCF 9 licensing for home labs.~~

Update

VCF 9 licensing is now enabled. For more information my blog post VMware Home Lab Tokens goes into detail.

That’s all it takes to get your VMware home lab licenses after passing your VCP-VCF exam.

Hardware Choices for a Cert-Focused Lab

Because the entitlement is time-limited, the hardware decision should be made before the clock starts. Three approaches are common, and each has a different cost profile:

• A single server with local NVMe. The cheapest way to run a competent vSAN and vSphere lab. One modern 8-16 core box with 64-128 GB of RAM and two NVMe devices will host a nested ESXi fleet and an SDDC Manager management domain without complaint, and it doubles as a general-purpose homelab server afterwards.
• Two or three small nodes. The right choice if you intend to study vSAN stretched clusters, HA admission control or NSX edge failover, because those behaviours need real fault domains and cannot be honestly simulated on one host.
• Nested on an existing platform. Running the whole lab inside a hypervisor you already own keeps the hardware cost at zero and makes snapshots and rebuilds trivial. It costs performance, but for exams that test configuration and workflow rather than throughput, that is usually an acceptable trade.

Whichever you pick, size storage for snapshots: lab work involves a lot of "build it, break it, roll back", and thin-provisioned storage that looks generous on day one can fill unexpectedly in the middle of a vSAN study session.

Common Problems and What They Mean

The process is mostly waiting, and almost every reported problem is a variation on "I cannot see my entitlement yet". The three that cause the most confusion:

• The email lists a Site ID that you cannot associate with your account. This is expected, not an error. The first delivery email is generated by the same system that fulfils commercial purchases, and it fires before the certification entitlement is linked to your profile. Do not open a support case over it; wait for the final fulfilment notification.
• The licence appears but has no downloadable key. The key only materialises once the entitlement shows an expiry date. If the request is still "Pending" after a few hours, re-check the account you are signed in with - the entitlement is keyed to the email address used for the exam registration, and a second Broadcom account (for example a work address) will show nothing.
• You passed the exam but never received the eligibility email. Confirm the exam really is on the qualifying list for home lab licensing, then check the spam folder and the Broadcom profile's contact address. The entitlement is granted against the certification record, so if the record itself has not posted to your transcript, nothing will be issued.

Extending the Lab with VMUG Advantage

The 365-day validity is the part people underestimate. A lab that expires mid-study is worse than no lab at all, and the exam-plus-subscription combination is what makes the arrangement sustainable: with an active VMUG Advantage subscription the licensing can be renewed for a further two years, which comfortably covers the study window for the next certification in the ladder. Set a calendar reminder a month before expiry rather than discovering the lapse when an ESXi host refuses to accept a key, and treat the renewal as part of the certification budget rather than an afterthought.

Think of the entitlement as one piece of a lab plan, not the whole plan. The pieces that go around it are the same regardless of how the licence was obtained: enough hardware (or a nested environment) to run the topology you want to test, an out-of-band management path, and documented builds so a rebuild after a failed experiment takes an hour rather than a weekend. For the network side of that lab, our walkthroughs on VLAN-aware bridges and LACP bonds on Proxmox and on ESXi vSwitch port groups and teaming cover the virtual switching most labs get wrong; if you are mixing storage stacks, the iSCSI target configuration guide and the HPE 3PAR with VMware troubleshooting notes are useful companions when the SAN side misbehaves.

Activating the Keys: What Happens Next

Once the entitlement is live, the practical work begins. The keys from the certification portal can be applied in one of two ways depending on the product:

# vSphere / ESXi: apply a licence key from the host client or PowerCLI
Get-VMHost esx01.lab.local | New-VMHostLicense -LicenseKey "XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX"

# vCenter: assign through the licensing UI, or via the API
# Administration > Licensing > Licences > Add New Licence

VCF deploys through SDDC Manager rather than per-component keys, so the Cloud Foundation entitlement is consumed as part of bringing up the management domain - which is one reason the VCF 9 token model changed the workflow, and why the Home Lab Tokens follow-up is worth reading before you start a fresh deployment. Record the keys somewhere durable and, critically, record the expiry date alongside them: a lab whose licence lapses mid-project will refuse to power on VMs, and recovering from that while a study deadline is approaching is a distraction you can simply avoid.

Should You Take the Certification Route at All?

The honest answer is that it depends on what you want from the lab. If the goal is to study the VCF stack at the depth the certification requires, the exam route pays for itself twice - once as training material and once as a year of licensing - and it is the clearest signal an employer can see. If the goal is a small lab for experimenting with unrelated workloads, a hypervisor you can run without licensing concerns is the more sensible foundation, and the mainstream alternatives are entirely capable. The distinction worth keeping is between a certification lab, which should mirror the product you are certifying against, and an experimentation lab, where the cheapest capable platform wins. The entitlement described here is squarely for the first case.

For more information about the whole process, check out the VMUG Advantage Home Lab License Guide by Eric Nielsen on the VMware Code blog.