Everyone knows how difficult and expensive it can be to build a personal lab, yet that is often where practitioners and architects gain their most valuable hands-on experience with VMware technologies.

Earlier this year, Intel reached out and shared that they would be attending several VMUG Connect events to showcase how organizations can leverage the latest Intel Xeon 6 processors for AI inferencing using Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX).

Intel was also interested in doing something cool and fun for the VMUG community at these events, so after brainstorming a few ideas, we landed on what seemed like the obvious answer: giving away a system to an attendee that would allow them to get hands-on with AI workloads running on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)! 😆

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VMUG Advantage members who have recently earned their VCP-VCF certification are entitled to non-commercial VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) licenses for personal use. When logging into the Broadcom Certification Portal, you may have noticed that only perpetual licenses for VCF 5.x are available, with no listings for VCF 9.0.

VCF 9.0 introduces a new keyless entitlement model, which requires some additional work on Broadcom's backend systems. While the delay in availability is not ideal, it is actively being worked on, and we hope to share an update in the very near future.

With that said that, I recently came up with a proposal that would at least allow existing VMUG Advantage members who have passed their VCP-VCF certification to start deploying VCF 9.0 and leverage the in-product 90 day evaluation period while the backend licensing is being sorted out.

The missing link that prevented users from deploying VCF is the fact that the VCF Installer also requires several metadata files, which is automatically retrieved when you have a Broadcom Support Entitlement, allowing you to generate a Broadcom Download Token.

Since VMUG Advantage members do not have a support entitlement, the quick workaround was to simply publish the the required VCF 9.0 metadata files. In addition, I have also included the folder structure within the download to further simplify the setup of a VCF Offline Depot, allowing users to deploy either a VVF or VCF 9.0 deployment.

Big thanks to the VCF Product, Engineering and Release Management for supporting this idea and rolling this out to our community while the longer term solution is being worked on.

UPDATE (12/08/25) - The new VMUG Advantage + VCP-VCF certification licensing is now available. You will need to authenticate into Broadcom Support Portal (BSP) and then open the following URL: https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/alpine-certificate which is where you will access both VCF 5.x and 9.x licensing and download tokens.

UPDATE (10/23/25) - It was shared on the VMware Community Podcast that the VCF 9.0 licensing for VMUG Advantage members w/their VCF Certification is planned to go live on Dec 8th! In addition, users will have the ability to generate download tokens and be able to go through the same experience as a user with support entitlements. The workaround posted here will no longer be required once the VCF 9.0 licensing has officially launched.

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