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2022 VMUG Advantage Community Group Buy

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It is that time of the year again, the event that you all have been waiting for ... the annual VMUG Advantage Community Group Buy! 😀


For those not familiar with the VMUG Advantage membership, it provides benefits such as access to training, 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, Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation. The EVALExperience alone is worth the normal $200 USD membership fee and is certainly one of the cheapest and easiest way to get access to all the latest VMware offerings for homelab and educational purposes.

Here are other benefits of VMUG Advantage:

  • Access to VMware Test Drive
  • 20-35% discounts on VMware training and certification
  • This 15% discount is only offered once a year through this offer
  • Advantage members receive $100 USD VMware Explore Discount (not stackable)
  • Full list of Advantage Benefits: https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership

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.

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Quick Tip - Enabling vCenter Events for NTP (Network Time Protocol) or PTP (Precision Time Protocol) operations

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Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you may have noticed a new "Enable monitoring events" setting when configuring time for your ESXi hosts, whether that is using the classic Network Time Protocol (NTP) or the newly introduced Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

What exactly does this enabling this setting do? This was a recent question that I had answered internally and figured I would share the detail as the description may not be super clear. Simply put, this enables the publishing of different NTP and/or PTP operations as vCenter Server Events, which can then be used to audit time skews in your environment for compliance to troubleshooting or debugging.

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Quick Tip - Adding a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM

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I had an interesting question this morning asking whether it was possible to add a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM? The user was interested in testing a particular scenario with the new vSphere Trust Authority feature that was introduced in the vSphere 7.0. I personally had not done much with vTPM and I had assumed it should just work as long as you have a physical TPM chip in the underlying hardware and you have setup either a Standard or Native Key Provider within your vCenter Server.

The user observed that adding a vTPM to a Windows VM was possible using the vSphere UI but when attempting to perform the same operation on a Nested ESXi VM, the option to add vTPM device was not available. After spending ~30 minutes asking around for hardware that had a physical TPM, I remember that my Quartz Canyon NUC (NUC 9 Pro) is a Xeon based system and it has TPM 2.0 chip. I was able to take a closer look and quickly found the solution was very pretty straight forward!

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