2/8/15
Once again being a very active member of the www.techexams.net community I have discovered VMUG. VMUG is a user-based group that focuses on the areas of VMware and it’s solutions. I joined the network and 3 weeks ago I purchased the VMUG Advantage subscription and to my amazement this year VMware is offering the following software for home-lab users:
Included products are:
- VMware vCenter Server™ 5 Standalone for vSphere 5
- VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ Enterprise Plus
- VMware vCloud Suite® Standard
- VMware vRealize™ Operations Insight™
- VMware vRealize Operations™ 6 Enterprise
- VMware vRealize Log Insight™
- VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon®
- VMware Horizon® Advanced Edition
- VMware Virtual SAN™
VMUG Advantage: link
Well one of the neat things they did recently is now the subscription allows me to use 3 hosts with up to 6 CPU’s and unlimited cores. So…… now my home cluster can have Enterprise Plus licensing with vCOPS and vSAN. I still have enough for a 3rd host later on down the road if I choose to get one for even more testing.
One of the things I really like is vCOPS and what it shows you in one pane of glass. The feature of this solution really help for complex and large datacenters. I’ve been using at work and the centralized management of my cluster is amazing. it makes vCenter look like a walk in the park. At some point I will test on vRealize but for right now I’m having way too much fun with the vSphere 5.5 w/ vCOPS and vSAN in my QNAP Ts-420 IP SAN in the home lab.
I’m really quite excited that VMware is doing this technet-oriented subscription for VMware. I like home-labbing and spend over 20+ hours a week invested into labbing with VMware, Cisco, Microsoft, and Sonicwall technologies and having a licensed and fully working VMware cluster really helps replicate a Enterprise grade network as close to the real deal as can be physically possible. I’m looking forward to now cramming these existing twin Dell R610’s with 64 GB’s of RAM and fully utilizing there benefits to a home cluster…..
My only problem now is I need to expand my home network out of a /24 into a /23 or use multiple vlans for all my VM’s and projects, lol! – Never thought that would happen!
Below is my vCOPS for my home lab, and without this solution I would have never been able to see that my VM’s are over provisioned.
