"OEM"-Licenses for vsphere - generally fakes ?

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DanAnd

Member
Jul 25, 2016
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Dortmund, Germany
www.danand.de
Hi,

Here and there I see selles (usually) on ebay selling vsphere licenses which are with no support and no upgrades available. Usually they have some descriptions like "pulled off an old server" / "was attached to hardware bundle which doesn't need vsphere" or similar.

While there are such OEM licenses for Windows OS and they are legal to sell (at least in Europe), I never heard of similar VMware vsphere licenses.

I suspect that these keys are somehow created with key-generators, however if there really have been OEM licenses with no support and no upgrade pathes, such licenses could be interesting for me as a one-shot buy for my home server (in comparison to the VMware Users group subscriptions).

Any hints on that?

Thanks,

Daniel
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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There are keygens for vmware products lying around, so be careful.
 

Rand__

Well-Known Member
Mar 6, 2014
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then you have all the licenses you would ever need
Wellll not really, but you get plenty ;)
Only bad thing about VMUG is that you don't get updated versions until they are available on their site. And if you got 6.5 3 months before 7 comes out you have to wait... or do the trial to get the software.
 

pricklypunter

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Nov 10, 2015
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Canada
Only bad thing about VMUG is that you don't get updated versions until they are available on their site. And if you got 6.5 3 months before 7 comes out you have to wait... or do the trial to get the software.
A happy coincidence of that, is you also avoid most of the initial bugs VMWare like to introduce with each new version :)

I would say that VMUG is still good value for money though, certainly way safer than some unknown from the ether :)
 
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Rand__

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Mar 6, 2014
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Lol, thats true.
And o/c its good value - went for the 3 year plan which gives another nice discount on top of the 10% available regularly
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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I never heard of similar VMware vsphere licenses
The licenses are bundled with hardware from the vendor (dell, hp, lenovo, fujitsu and so on). These versions have all the functions of esxi + additional software for managing and drivers.

they are legal to sell (at least in Europe)
It's not that simple. In some cases microsoft got right and the "oem licenses" were seized and destroyed, in other cases microsft had to allow the use/selling of oem licenses.
 

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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I thought it was legal to sell them on in the EU, providing the original hardware the license applied to, was still attached to the label :D

imho second user licenses will always be a contentious grey area until software vendors stop using legalese to protect their a$$ when someone points out something that they didn't think of ahead of time, and they start using plain language that leaves everyone in no doubt whatsoever about their intentions and expectations :)