VMware VMUG Advantage worth doing?

Software & Web Applications
1

It looks like I need to get myself a little VMware experience, probably mostly so I can learn to migrate VMs from VMware to something else. Not sure if the 60 day evaluations are going to fulfill what I need, it looks like you can’t easily renew them or relicense them.

Is the VMUG Advantage worth doing in this case? I might be able to get a discount, just emailed them to see.

Also anyone that works with this stuff know how old a processor is allowed to be before it’s not supported? I’m probably going to need to use my HP T740 machines for this, these are AMD Ryzen V1756b powered (4c8t) and looks like I can go up to 64GB of DDR4. Storage I’ll figure out down the road, probably my lab Truenas Core will get a new share or two.

[edit] Looks like the processor is supported under the v1000 series for ESXi.

2

Depends on what you are trying to migrate to. Proxmox? XCPNG? Hyper-V?

3

You can download vmware workstation for free now, if you can navigate Broadcoms website, and just test it out for yourself. From what I can see ESXi is no longer free.

Migrating from vmware is a real pain, Proxmox has “new” functionality to import vmware vms, though the (windows vms) ones I tested failed to boot up for me.

4

Neogrid highlights why I think I need to spend the money, somewhere down the road, you are going to need to move Windows VMs from VMware to something else. For my lab I’d be moving from VMware to XCP-NG (8.3). I don’t want to use the free Workstation because it just can’t be the same as the full ESXi and VCenter, and that’s what I’m going to run into in the near future. Long term future and there won’t be many places left that still have VMware running.

I got a message back from the Advantage program and I can get 15% off ($210 normal price) which gives access to the full VSphere for a calendar year, I assume I could buy additional years down the road. There are some limits on this plan, still weeding them out. This is the “student” account for educational users.

You can also register for a 60 day full demo, once that runs out, you are “done”, it is built to get a system set up and running, test a bit, then buy the products you actually need.

5

Actually in Workstation you need to export it in OVF format to be able to then import it into ESXi. It’s the same format that ESXi uses, I still have ESXi 7 running in a vm but still haven’t been successful.

I’d bet given Broadcom way of handling vmware, the other vendors will start to produce better import options.

Pays your money takes your pick.

6

Why not use the built-in tools from XOA to import from ESXi to XCPNG?

7

That’s my plan, but something that needs to be tested because not every move works the way we want it to work. My whole goal here is to learn enough to ride the wave of people ditching VMWare for something else.

8

You could backup the vmdk’s and then use this.

After that create your VM’s, then attach your drives to the VM.

9

When it comes to what hardware is supported, I would check out the VMware HCL site.

I have a VMUG Advantage subscription and I think it is worth it. I’ve deployed vCenter/ESXi, VSAN, and NSX. It is a great way to get experience with the product.

However, I don’t see many enterprises moving off of VMware unless they are going to a public cloud. If there was a migration scenario worth learning, that would be it.

10

Thanks. I bought more RAM and a couple NVME for my HP T740 and I’m going to set this up. The VMware site does say this processor family is compatible, and the emails with VMUG suggest the same. The only thing they said was that these Advantage plans are only good for 16 cores. Assuming that cores are calculated the same as XCP-NG, then two T740 are 16 cores.

I interviewed with a company and one of the things that came up was VMware, so I asked what they were doing. For now their VMware guru managed to reduce the core count enough where they could continue. A friend works there and he hasn’t said that they hired anyone, it was more of the “hey we were talking about maybe hiring, send me your resume”. Have to keep looking. They really wanted someone in a specific silo, and sounded like they wanted someone to sit at the help desk.

11

If you need any help setting it up, feel free to reach out. One thing that is nice about the newer versions of ESXi is that you can do nested virtualization so you only really need one server for your labbing. I use Workstation for mine so that is an option too. You just want to make sure you have a SSD drive or things will lag, which in your case doesn’t sound like it’ll be an issue.