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Special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy

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The VMware Community Homelabs Project is a crowdsourcing effort that I had started back in February that enables the VMware community to help share the various VMware homelab configurations, usage and costs into a single location that can benefit our larger community. With the success of that project and the "hardware" aspects out of the way, I wanted to see what else I could do to help our VMware community in terms of the "software" aspects, as that is just as important.

The most popular solution by far today is to sign up for a VMUG Advantage membership which gives you access to a number of benefits including training and VMworld discounts but also to EVALExperience, which provides you with 365-days access (non-production usage) to the latest VMware solutions such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vRealize Suite and VMware Cloud Foundation. The EVALExperience alone is worth the $200 USD membership and is certainly one of the cheapest and easiest way to get access to all the latest VMware offerings for homelab purposes. Throughout the year, there are usually promo codes that you can find that ranges anywhere from 5-10% discount, but I wanted to see if we could do better 🙂

Today, I am very excited to announce a partnership between virtuallyGhetto and the VMware User Group (VMUG) organization to share with the VMware Community a special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy offering. The table below provides the respective discounts based on the quantity of VMUG Advantage membership purchases. The larger the interests group, the larger the discount.

UPDATE (04/25/20) - The survey has officially closed and I will send in the final list to the VMUG folks which you will be receiving an email with instructions on how to obtain your promotional code. In total, we had a total of 701 respondents!


UPDATE (04/20/20) - We now have over 600+ folks registered. Everyone signed up (please sign up as that is the only way to take part in the group buy) will receive the 15% discount. I have already spoken to the VMUG folks and they will be working on getting the promotion code ready so folks can start purchasing immediately, stay tuned for that update via email. We have also agreed to leave the survey up for another week (Fri 4/24 will be last day) to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to sign up.

Quantity Discount Cost
1-99 12% $176
100-199 14% $172
200-300 15% $170

With the GA of vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0, there is no better time to consider VMUG Advantage to get access to the latest releases. If that was not enough, I should also mention that VMUG Advantage will also include the upcoming VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 release, which will allow folks to also try out the new vSphere with Kubernetes capabilities, which is currently only available as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation SKU.

Note: Licenses from VMUG Advantage can NOT be used for Production purposes.

If you are interested in participating in the VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy, please fill out the following survey below to express your interests in purchasing a VMUG Advantage subscription(s). This survey is planned to be open for two weeks to gauge the level of interests and help determine the final promotion discount. Please share this with friends and colleagues and its never too early to start thinking about Christmas gifts for that special someone 😉

Once the survey period has closed, you will be contacted by the VMUG organization with the details of the promotion along with the promotion code to apply towards your VMUG Advantage membership. Depending on the amount of interests, we could potentially close the survey sooner if we reach 200+ folks.

Here's short URL for the survey in case you want to share with others: http://vmwa.re/vmug-adv-groupbuy

Homelab considerations for vSphere 7

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With the vSphere 7 Launch Event just a few days away, I know many of you are eager to get your hands on this latest release of vSphere and start playing with it in you homelab. A number of folks in the VMware community have already started covering some of the amazing capabilities that will be introduced in vSphere and vSAN 7 and I expect to see that ramp up even more in the coming weeks.

One area that I have not seen much coverage on is around homelab usage with vSphere 7. Given this is a pretty significant release, I think there are some things you should be aware of before you rush out and immediately upgrade your existing homelab environment. As with any vSphere release, you should always carefully review the release notes when they are made available and verify the hardware and its underlying components are officially on the VMware HCL, this is the only way to ensure that you will have a good and working experience.

Having said that, here are just a few of the observations that I have made while running pre-GA builds of vSphere 7 in my own personal homelab. This is not an exhaustive list and I will try to update this article as more information is made available.

Disclaimer: The following considerations below is based on my own personal homelab experience using a pre-GA build of vSphere 7 and it does not reflect any official support or guidance from VMware. Please use these recommendation at your own risk.

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Sonnet Solo5G Multi-Gig (1G/2.5G/5G) USB Adapter works with ESXi

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Last week I caught this tweet from Blake Garner who is an active VMware Community member that I follow and I came to learn that Sonnet just launched their first Multi-Gigabit (1GbE, 2.5GbE & 5GbE) USB Network Adapter called the Solo5G.

https://twitter.com/trodemaster/status/1234999442991800320

This of course piqued my interest for VMware Homelabs as last year we had just enabled the first Multi-Gigabit USB Network Adapter from QNAP supporting ESXi using the popular USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi. The QNAP device uses an Aquantia chipset and I had a funny suspicion that the Sonnet device might be using either the exact same or simliar chipset.

To confirm my theory, I reached out to the folks over at Sonnet and they were kind enough to send me a unit for validation which just arrived earlier this week. I had an Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon) already running and I just plugged it in and to my surprise it worked immediately since it already had the USB Native Driver Fling installed.


So there you have it, same chipset as the QNAP and best of all this device is only $79.99 USD which be purchased directly from Sonnet here. As of writing this blog post, the Solo5G is much cheaper than the QNAP. In fact, it seems the price of the QNAP has significantly increased since I had first blogged about it. I think multi-gig NICs both USB-based but also PCIe and respective switches is starting to become more mainstream, at least in the consumer markets and this is certainly an easy way to add additional bandwidth without breaking the bank. Big thanks to the folks at Sonnet and Blake for sharing the news!