End of VMUG Advantage EvalExperience

[bateau]

Just got a mail today from VMUG Advantage that many feared already. Here is the wording:

• November 30, 2024: This is the final date to access EvalExperience licenses through the current VMUG Advantage process. The Kivuto/OnTheHub platform will be available until this date, allowing you to download any remaining licenses.
• December 1, 2024: After November 30, the current process for downloading EvalExperience licenses will end, and licenses will no longer be automatically provided through VMUG Advantage.
• Future Access To Licenses: VMUG Advantage members will have access to a new pathway for obtaining VCF and VVS non-production, personal use licenses through Broadcom’s VCP program. More details on this program will be shared as they become available.

Also see https://www.vmug.com/wp-content/upl...ience-Update-VMUG-Advantage-FAQ-11_5_2025.pdf

Please correct me if I'm mistaking, but to me that means:

• you have to be Broadcom VCP certified to be able to use an equivalent of EvalExperience. No possibility for "use while you learn" after the 60 day trial license expires.
• somewhere in 2025, that new VCP-VCF or VCP-VVF tied program will start. In the meantime: no solution for you.
• and for those who aren't VCP or vExpert:
  • for those who prepaid a couple of years, bad luck. You will lose your money.
  • for those that have licenses that were supposed to renew after November 30, you will not be able to renew the licenses, as you can only download license keys that are expired or are very close to expiration. So: You will not only lose your money, but now also suddenly, with less than a month notice, you will be forced to migrate to the competition or shut down in a very short time frame.

Way to go Broadcom.

 

[BennyT]

Today I received that email from VMUG Advantage too, saying that after November 30 2024 the Kivuto/OnTheHub online store will no longer be available for downloading VMware software products or the yearly license keys.

Instead, Broadcom will allow VMUG Advantage members access to the Broadcom Support Portal, and somehow associate that connection to our VMUG Advantage Membership account. From there we should have access to Broadcom VVF (Vmware Vsphere Foundation - i.e. ESXi and vSphere products) downloads and license keys. This will be funneled through the Broadcom VCP (Vmware Certified Professional) Program. The VCP program would give us access, as long as we use the products for only personal and non-production use, such as in a home lab.




I've emailed advantage@vmug.com for more details and to see how assured they are that Broadcom will honor VMUG Advantage memberships, to allow me to download license keys and product software etc. This would be awesome actually, because I was getting REALLY worried that Broadcom would close all access and I'd be forced to switch to Proxmox ve or some other hypervisor.

I'm still waiting to hear back from VMUG, but I think they are still figuring out the details with Broadcom on portal access etc.

*edit: Nov 7 2024: Per Autumn at VMUG: This new program will require VMUG Advantage members to hold a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification in either VCF or VVF to qualify for access to the licenses, which will be provided for personal, non-production use.

*edit: the following was posted prior to me receiving Autumn's email reply, excerpt shown above.

In the meantime I decided to inquire with chatGPT, which is pretty awesome tool in itself.




Fortunately for me, my current VMUG vSphere license keys won't expire until Sept 30 2025, so I have a little breathing room before those expire. But what about people whose license keys expire on Jan 1st 2025? They cannot download new license keys until their existing license ends. They would be unable to login to kuvito/OnTheHub to grab new license before the site shuts down. Hopefully broadcom and vmug will have all of this sorted by Nov 30 2024 (soon) and we'll simply login to Broadcom Portal, verify our VMUG and download the license keys etc as needed. I'm oversimplifying it a little, but that's basically how I see it going.. Fingers crossed.

- Benny

 

[bateau]

Looking forward to any feedback from them.

FYI, I have a license that expires 15 Dec 2024, and cannot download a new license. Maybe from 16 Nov I can?

 

[BennyT]

Looking forward to any feedback from them.

FYI, I have a license that expires 15 Dec 2024, and cannot download a new license. Maybe from 16 Nov I can?

*I'll update here after I learn more about how it will work.

 

[BennyT]

@bateau
I just received the email reply from VMUG. It sounds like your original posting is correct. VCP (VMware Certified Professional) certification is required in addition to the VMUG Advantage Membership. My understanding that the VMUG Advantage membership would basically give us that access is incorrect. Meaning there is a lengthy and involved certification path to achieve VCP.

Looks like I'll be researching how to migrate to Proxmox or such. Ouch!!!

Here is the reply from VMUG which I just received:

Hello Benny,

Thank you for reaching out with your questions about the recent changes to VMUG Advantage and the license access for your home lab. I’ll do my best to clarify based on the information we have from Broadcom so far.



Starting December 1, 2024, VMUG Advantage will no longer provide automatic access to EvalExperience license downloads through Kivuto/OnTheHub. Instead, Broadcom will offer a new pathway for VMUG Advantage members to access VMware licenses, expected to roll out in 2025. This new program will require VMUG Advantage members to hold a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certification in either VCF or VVF to qualify for access to the licenses, which will be provided for personal, non-production use. However, specific details about accessing these licenses, including the login process for Broadcom's Customer Support Portal, are still being finalized. We anticipate sharing more information about the access and login process as the 2025 rollout approaches.


If you renew your VMUG Advantage membership now, you will continue to receive all other VMUG Advantage benefits, including exclusive webinars, training discounts, and more. While the new Broadcom program will not be immediately accessible, keeping an active VMUG Advantage membership may be beneficial, as it will be required for license access through Broadcom in the future.


If you extend your VMUG Advantage membership now, you will maintain eligibility for the new Broadcom program in 2025, provided you also meet the certification requirement.


We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work with Broadcom to ensure a smooth transition. If you have any further questions or would like additional assistance, please feel free to reach out.



Thank you!
Autumn Smith

 

[marcoi]

sucks but its time to move off vmware products. I have till 06/25 to move my home lab off esxi etc...

 

[Greg_E]

Yeah, got this too. I'm harvesting all the products offered right now. I'm very disappointed in Broadcom, they seem to be actively making their products for the elite only users. I've only had my Advantage membership for about a month, so this really sucked for me. I thought the Advantage licenses were a very good plan that could help most home lab people get experience with their products for a reasonable yearly license fee. Wish I had known about it sooner, I'd be working at a different place making a lot more money.

When I reached out to VMUG, Autumn replied and said that at least Broadcom has dropped the requirement to attend an official training class before you can take the VCP. I think I'm going to try and do that after I finish a udemy VCTA course that I already started.

And let me be clear on my objectives... vSphere knowledge is just to help me get in the door, my goal is to help the next place migrate from VMware to some other hypervisor. I've been using XCP-NG for a few years now in my lab and not quite 2 years in production. Even if a site can't completely remove VMware, I'm wanting to reduce the core count to as low as possible.

My lab is currently 3 HP DL360p Gen8 for XCP-NG, 1 HP DL360e Gen8 for Truenas (24.10), and 2 HP T740 for vSphere. Everything is on 10gbe with some gigabit additional interfaces (2.5gbe on the T740 through the a+e m.2 socket). Mikrotik and old Cisco switches with a mix of DAC and optical for the 10gbe.

 

[BennyT]

sucks but its time to move off vmware products. I have till 06/25 to move my home lab off esxi etc...

Yep. I'm deciding between Proxmox VE or XCP-NG.

The only issue I have against Proxmox VE, and it's not a huge deal, is that is sit's ontop of a Debian Linux OS. That in itself isn't a problem, but having to upgrade to a later Major Release of Debian while having applications (Proxmox) installed in that OS, may not be an easy in-place upgrade.

For that reason I'm leaning more towards XCP.

I'm thinking of purchasing a HP microserver or a supermicro 5028-TNT4 mini tower server, and using that to experiment with Proxmox and XCP-NG and see which one I like.

 

[Greg_E]

Yes, upgrading Debian is a pain, I don't know why they can't streamline that process like many other operating systems.

I have XCP in production (and lab). I will suggest that going forward you select hardware that can UEFI boot and really that can have TPM2.0. There is a warning on the latest (8.3) version of XCP that says UEFI boot may be required in the future. I was told that this is coming from the Xenserver side and XCP isn't sure if they will follow or split and allow bios boot. It cuts a lot of good, cheap homelab equipment out if UEFI is required. None of my Gen8 servers support it, and each host is 20 cores and 128gb of ram which is a lot for a homelab. They are also 100 watts at idle so not ideal.

I'm looking to move to a mini PC but the NIC are garbage in most of these. My VMware portion is going up on a couple HP T740 and it seems I'll be able to test "enough" if I stuff 64GB in each. Smaller storage is currently the problem as I can't find a "cheap" solution for Truenas with a 10gbe connection. By cheap I mean under $300 and hopefully under about 25 watts at lab usage levels. I think I'm going to have to live with slow random read/write and use a single nvme in another T740 and a 10gbe card.

 

[marcoi]

going to try XCP-NG as well. its free usage? Does it have a vcenter equivalent management ui? Backup solutions?
I have like 5 servers in my home lab and using a lot of the advance features of vcenter, like vmotion, distributed switches etc.

 

[Greg_E]

With XCP-NG, pretty much EVERYTHING is controlled by Xen Orchestra, you can use a terminal for many things if that is your style. XCP-NG is free and open sourced, download and go. XO is a bit harder, you can run their paid version with all the features, or you can run the open source versions that lacks a few things.

Instructions for building XO are here: Installation | XO documentation

Many of us run the automated scripts or download the image from here: GitHub - ronivay/XenOrchestraInstallerUpdater: Xen Orchestra install/update script

My personal method is to "install" the image from the XCP-NG host terminal onto the host that is going to be my pool Master (local storage). Then you can build your pool, attach your Storage Repositories (SR), migrate the XO-CE VM to one of those SR, etc.

Attached is my very basic quick start guide from my lab. I wrote this to remind myself how to do this since you generally don't start from scratch very often and I forgot a few steps when I put my production system in place. There have been a few changes/updates since XCP-NG 8.3 went to release, but nothing major. When XO-Lite is finished, I'll be changing my guide because I should be able to do a lot of things from XO-Lite.

You will also need the Windows agent from Xenserver.com, this is still free. I often put a few tools into a folder and make an ISO of these tools, load that into the ISO SR and it is easy to insert into a VM, just like inserting a CD in a physical machine. You can copy these ISO in with a file browser, or you can "upload" them with XO. The XO way will give them a UUID for a file name, good luck if you reimport them or need to use them elsewhere.

 

[BennyT]

Thank you Greg

Regarding backups though;

Backing up the hypervisor configuration itself and the individual guest VMs is something I need to consider, deciding between free prox and free xcp.

I dont think there is a solution for incremental VM backups with the free xcp, only with the paid xen orchestra pro. And i don't think Veeam backup and replication works with xcp.

Proxmox, all features are free, including it's backup solution for VMs. It can also do incremental backups. Proxmox VMs can also be incrementally backed up with Veeam, incase we wanted to use it instead of proxmox own backup tools for some reason (not sure why).

Xcp has an advantage when backing up the hypervisor configuration, in that it's basically a single command to create the pool config backup for a single node. And similar to restore the config, i think.

Proxmox configuration backup is more complex and involves copying Linux folders and files and restoring those individual files if needing to rebuild your hypervisor configuration. Although that can probably be scripted to streamline it into a nightly config backup or something.

The incremental backups via free proxmox got me leaning to free proxmox more than free xcp. Unless there is way to incrementally backup free xcp VMs consistently and reliably?

Thanks

*typed all this from my phone while at sitting in a Costco store, apologies in advance for any typing mistakes

 

[marcoi]

@Greg_E I saw you posted about vmug like licensing on xcp forums. Looks like it got shot down.
VMware VMUG Advantage like program?

they need licensing that offers essential+ features without support side so they can lower the pricing for home lab users.
I would pay something for the features but not multiple 1000s.

Is XO open sourced at all where if you compile your own to get all the features or is it always going to need licensing to get features to work?

 

[Greg_E]

Marcoi,

I agree that we need XCP-NG to bring us a lab license that is limited in scope for somewhere in that $200 per year, just like VMUG Advantage.

There are certain features that can not be compiled from source, XOstor (hyperconverged storage) is one of them, XOstor is a third party partnership with Linbit (I think). I'd have to go through all the XO-CE options to see what works and what doesn't.

BennyT

The XCP pools already have a kind of backup built in. The pool config is copied to every member and you can force one of the existing hosts to become master. As far as backing it up to external, I'm not sure.

Many users are using Truenas for their VM storage which gives the benefit of incremental backups to the free XOA. Otherwise I'm pretty sure you are correct that incremental through XOA is a paid option, but I'd need to look more closely to be certain.

Veeam is working with Vates to bring their features to XCP-NG, that kind of tells you where the market is expanding. I bet it costs them a lot of money to change their code to work with XCP-NG so nothing we should discount. If they are backing the project, then XCP-NG must be gaining ground.

I'll drop the other guide I made myself, it's the basic XCP-NG install guide. It's pretty much just a click through but I documented it "for the next guy" because I know the next guy is probably going to be an open source hater and familiar with VMware (law of averages in IT). Both of these will need to be updated when they get XO 6 and XO-Lite done, looking forward to that and hopefully a new beta that uses a more recent kernel. There are a few nice things with NFS in kernel 5.10+ and XCP is still on a custom 4.19. This is some stuff that might help us bring the speeds up when doing a lot of small reads or writes to NFS shares. Xenserver is also on that same old kernel and part of the reason that XCP doesn't upgrade.

I looked at proxmox and always got the idea that it was paid, I'll have to look at it more closely and see what I can see. I also want to get a Nutanix system up at some point, probably after I chase down some VMware experience and probably on the same hardware. Keeping XCP-NG as my base, just trying to learn so I can migrate stuff away from VMware because I think there may still be a few years left in that game, hoping for a better paying job by knowing a bit about several options.

 

[Greg_E]

Under the Backup tab, I think the XO config and pool metadata is the button to click to back up the pool info.

 

[marcoi]

im running xo container on my qnap nas and its working so far
going to keep playing with product but i can live with some feature missing and running a container for home lab.

 

[FrankTL]

Yes, upgrading Debian is a pain, I don't know why they can't streamline that process like many other operating systems.

I have XCP in production (and lab). I will suggest that going forward you select hardware that can UEFI boot and really that can have TPM2.0. There is a warning on the latest (8.3) version of XCP that says UEFI boot may be required in the future. I was told that this is coming from the Xenserver side and XCP isn't sure if they will follow or split and allow bios boot. It cuts a lot of good, cheap homelab equipment out if UEFI is required. None of my Gen8 servers support it, and each host is 20 cores and 128gb of ram which is a lot for a homelab. They are also 100 watts at idle so not ideal.

I'm looking to move to a mini PC but the NIC are garbage in most of these. My VMware portion is going up on a couple HP T740 and it seems I'll be able to test "enough" if I stuff 64GB in each. Smaller storage is currently the problem as I can't find a "cheap" solution for Truenas with a 10gbe connection. By cheap I mean under $300 and hopefully under about 25 watts at lab usage levels. I think I'm going to have to live with slow random read/write and use a single nvme in another T740 and a 10gbe card.

I'm surprised there's any hardware out there manufactured in the last 10 years that doesn't support UEFI boot, but I'll take your word for it. When I read the UEFI thing in the XCP-ng 8.3 release notes, I assumed they were talking about the legacy bios implementation for guest VMs, but it seems that was an incorrect assumption.

What worries me slightly more about XCP-ng is that the 8.3 hypervisor still ships with CentOS 7 - Vates claims to use very little code from the distribution to run XCP-ng and that the risk is manageable. This may be true, but I have two concerns with this:
1. most organisations and their security auditors will not like CentOS7 code in production use beyond EOL; even if there's little additional risk, it will need to be justified and explained explicitly and as a result adds to the effort/paperwork/time needed for compliance.
2. From forum posts it seems that Citrix and/or Vates provides and maintains a large part of the OS stack on which XCP-ng runs - while this may mitigate the risk posed by CentOS 7, I'd prefer them using more code actively maintained by a large upstream distribution.

Tldr; It'd be good if XCP-ng can transition asap to an alternative distribution.

 

[fohdeesha]

I'm surprised there's any hardware out there manufactured in the last 10 years that doesn't support UEFI boot, but I'll take your word for it. When I read the UEFI thing in the XCP-ng 8.3 release notes, I assumed they were talking about the legacy bios implementation for guest VMs, but it seems that was an incorrect assumption.

What worries me slightly more about XCP-ng is that the 8.3 hypervisor still ships with CentOS 7 - Vates claims to use very little code from the distribution to run XCP-ng and that the risk is manageable. This may be true, but I have two concerns with this:
1. most organisations and their security auditors will not like CentOS7 code in production use beyond EOL; even if there's little additional risk, it will need to be justified and explained explicitly and as a result adds to the effort/paperwork/time needed for compliance.
2. From forum posts it seems that Citrix and/or Vates provides and maintains a large part of the OS stack on which XCP-ng runs - while this may mitigate the risk posed by CentOS 7, I'd prefer them using more code actively maintained by a large upstream distribution.

Tldr; It'd be good if XCP-ng can transition asap to an alternative distribution.

Hi, it's not centOS 7 - it's a totally custom distro with custom kernel. CentOS 7 just happens to be the "closest" when you want to install third party packages etc

 

[DavidWJohnston]

I also received this email about VMUG. I'm rather disappointed, I've been a subscriber and supporter of this program for years. It's not a surprise though. I also feel bad for the VMUG staff, they're not just worried about SW licensing, but maybe their jobs too... And they have to deal with all sorts of angry people.

I think the writing has been on the wall for a while now to migrate small private cloud infra away from VMware. That's what Broadcom wants, and I don't see any reason to fight it. They paid for the rights to the company, and they can steer it any way they like, it's their privilege.

There is a huge amount of $$ in IT consulting for migrations, and many of us are beneficiaries of this. (Writing tools for Groupwise to Outlook migrations paid for my engineering degree, haha yes I'm old.)

I know this forum is about homelabs, but we have day jobs, and maybe trying to profit from change is the best way to deal with it.

 

[Greg_E]

I can tell you that one state college system is creating a group buy contract for VMware, and it seems to be more than 26,000 CPUs for the basic options for VCF (vSphere also seems to be going away, but included in VCF). Going to be millions of dollars a year. This is how little fish group together to meet the Broadcom standards. Still negotiating prices and I won't quote that anyway.

Udemy had a VCP course on sale cheap, so I bought it. Maybe I'll spend the money on a cert, have to see how I feel after going through the courses (VCTA and VCP). For many places VMware isn't going away and they are not looking at alternatives nor how they can reduce their core count.

Regarding the old Centos 7 parts, they do backport anything that's important. But you won't be getting features from newer kernels like the NFS features I'm wanting to try that were built into 5.10+

I only recommend HP DL360 Gen9 servers now, these have UEFI. My gen8 do not and no updates to add it (I'm on the latest/last BIOS and BMC). I think these are from around 2012 and were supported up to around 2018-2019 which was why I got them cheap on the used market. Now that I've seen what I really need for a lab, I probably won't be buying this level of hardware again. ESXi runs fine on the T740, the VMs are nice and fast on both local storage and NFS shares, and it seems to handle the over provisioned CPU just fine. XCP-NG handles over provision fine, so it will eventually get moved to something lower power. heat, and noise. I don't need what it thinks are 40 cores per host, but the ram is nice to have, I don't like the thought of overprovisioned ram with Windows VMs. Not real reason, just don't like it.