Archive for the ‘VMTN Subscription’ Category

Today I got an email from Microsoft announcing the all-new TechNet Subscriber Portal Experience – initially I thought it was going to be reminder to renew my subscription. The new features include:

• Browse Product A–Z: all products listed alphabetically
• Browse Product categories: the familiar category view
• Top Products: quick access to the most common products
• New Downloads: RSS feed of the latest releases
• New Products: products that have new downloads available
• Search: fastest way to find a download when you know what you’re looking for
• Faster search results via autocomplete & acronym recognition
• Easier access and management of account information
• Simpler purchase and upgrade experience

That first one made me smile. If products weren’t listed alphabetically in the past, how were they listed? Randomly?

Joking apart it’s nice to see Microsoft make continued investment into their TechNet subscription system, even if it does mean knowing that the letter A comes before the letter B in the alphabet!

Today, one of my editors at TechTarget asked what was happening on the VMTN Subscription Movement. The original post I made on the community forums now boasts 8,995 views, and 237 replies. Last year there was a group concall of VMware vExperts where folks dialed into express their views, and I had one-to-one chat with a VMware representative who is gathering information about the concept to write a report & present to senior management. Interestingly, its movement has triggered a much broad reassessment of how VMware manages access to its software generally – something that surprised and delighted me. I’ve yet to hear back on this – but I did offer to look over the report and add my own thoughts and views.

At the time I did suggest that VMware look at other vendor programmes like TechNet to avoid any “wheel reinventing”. I pleased to hear that VMware with typical gusto would prefer to do something better than Microsoft. So at the moment there’s no firm news or announcement. All I do know is that VMware are listening (which is the main thing) and seriously considering their options…

I first met Josh Atwell at RTP, in North Carolina – I just happened to be in town, and got to speak at the VMUG he runs there. Josh is a Husband, Dad, Golfer, & Audiobookphile. VMware VCAP-DCD/VCP/Engineer/Architect – and does a lot of work for Cisco. He also runs a blog called: http://www.vtesseract.com/

In this miniwag about the VMTN Subscription I asked Josh about his personal experiences of having to use 60-day evals, and whether there was any possibility that the VMTN Subscription could “undermine” the partner programs because they get NFRs licenses as part of other benefits.

I think youtube is doing something weird to the audio because the local .mov file sounds, great but once upload Josh sounded like he was talking through a paper cup. I had to put through another media encoder before uploading before it worked how I wanted it too.

Today (24th Nov) and Tomorrow, I’m recording a series of “miniwags” – 10 tens minutes of VoxPox Video all about the VMTN Subscription Movement. In case you don’t the campaign is community initiative to persuade VMware to bring back a “TechNet” style subscription for its technologies. If you want to find out more here’s some links:

The VMTN Community Forum Post – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123

My First Post on the subject: VMware! Bring back the VMTN Subscription (Please!)

Hear what other bloggers & Your peers think: Week 1: The VMTN Subscription Campaign – Blog Roll

Join the discussion on Twitter: #VMTNSubscriptionMovement

If you want to have your say – I will be recording from 9-5 GMT. All you need is Skype Account, Mic and Webcam.

First up is Michael Poore who I know personally from the London User Group – he’s a vExpert, and runs the popular blog vSpecialist.co.uk

Hear Michael thoughts and experiences on youtube…

Well, were are into our second week of the VMTN Movement. Things are chugging along nicely, although there’s been a significant tailing off in activity on the Community Forum post that I started :

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123

Were currently running at 5,560 views, and 200 odd replies. Many of those are +1′s which is something I called for in my original post. I’m now wondering if that call was very smart, as what we really need is people sometime and effort into expressing their opinions. Of course the trouble is that there is OVERWHELMING support for the reintroduction of the VMTN Subscription, where the debate is how should be done, and how to protect it from “misuse”.

There’s been increased activity in the bloggersphere – and if you are interest in hearing what my fellow peers/bloggers thing you can locate a hand list here:

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/2011/11/10/week-1-the-vmtn-subscription-campaign/

On a lighter note – I notice some bloggers have been creative in making their own photos & pictures symbolising the Movement. Many of them have picked up on the recent “Occupy” campaign. Indeed for a while OccupyVMware was a popular hashtag. Personally, I’m not sure if we really want the association. Putting aside whether you agree or not with the Occupy Movement, it seems apparent to me their often their objectives are unclear, and their tactics not perhaps well thought out. I’d like to think our goals, objectives and tactics are much directed than that. But anyway, the association is a fun one, and the photos are great!

Well, its nearly a week since I fired off my first blog post about the VMTN Subscription. We’ve trended on twitter, posted to forums and blogged incessantly. Who knows if our vCommunity can keep up the momentum? I hope we can. This evening (or is morning – it’s 3.30am and I’m having one of those nights where I can’t sleep) I thought it would be interesting to google “VMTN Subscription” and build a list of bloggers comments and ideas. If I’ve missed you – blame google. Drop me an email if you want your post to be included in this compendium:

Update: Josh Atwell has own compendium of links too: http://www.vtesseract.com/post/12629508601/vmtnsubscriptionmovement-links

Howard Marks – NetworkComputings.com – Restore The VMTN Subscription

Simon Seagrave – TechHead – The VMware VMTN Movement…

PCWorld.com – Blogosphere Launches Virtual ‘Occupy VMWare’ Campaign

InfoWorld – David Marshall – Blogosphere launches virtual ‘Occupy VMware’ campaign

Port115: VMTN

vSamurai: Another Take on the VMTN Subscription

Virtulization Practise:  The Campaign to Bring Back the VMTN Subscription

Michael Requeny: VMware give technet-esc subscriptions please

vTessract: Bring back VMTN Please!

CRN: VMware May Bring Back VMTN Subscription For Developers

SearchVirtualDataCentre UK: Users urge VMware to bring back VMTN subscription

Yellow Bricks: Investigating the options to bring back VMTN Subscriptions!

vSpecalist: VMTN Subscription Campaign

GabesVirtualWorld: VMware! Bring back the VMTN Subscription …

vNinja: VMTN Subscription

Boche.net: VMware: Bring Back VMTN Subscriptions

LoneSystemAdmin.net: Thoughts on the VMTN Subscription Idea – The Lone Sysadmin

vLadan: VMTN Subscription – Shout out Loud

Rick Vanover: VMTN Subscription–The Revival!

VirtualLifeStyle: VMTN Subscription

vInfrastructure: VMTN Subscription

Veeam Podcast: Special Episode – VMTN Subscription | Veeam Community Podcast

Last night VMware employee, blogger, author-supremo stepped into the online debate about the VMTN Subscription. If your into VMware you will obviously know Duncan Epping’s Yellow Bricks website. It appears that VMware have for sometime being investigating the option to re-introduce the VMTN Subs, far from being prompted by the recent online activity – its being something they have being discussing internally for some time. Here’s what Duncan says:

During the weekend I dropped my management an email about this campaign and all the traction it had within the community. Literally within minutes I had a reply. I am happy to be able to confirm that we are investigating the option to reinstate the VMTN Subscription program. Keep in mind that starting a program like this does take time and the program will need a serious overhaul. As such I cannot make any promises on when this will happen. I do want to stress that all feedback is highly appreciated, we are listening! All blog posts voicing your opinion on why this should happen are more then welcome and all comments on the VMTN thread will be read by our team.

Head over to the community thread and post your feedback:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/335123

At the time of writing that forum post has garnered 3,650 views, and over 150 replies. So there appears to be some definite movement on the issue – but I think its still important for folks to register there interest – so that senior management have a quantifiable measure of the numbers of people who are interested – it might even help them guage what the initial demand might be if the offering was re-instated.

To that aim today a new site has been launched called – bringbackvmtn.com has been established by some of the folks at the Global VMUG – and there’s also a “Bring Back VMTN” page on the the MyVMUG Site. It’s my understanding that they have for sometime being lobbying VMware to add the VMTN Subscription into the “VMUG Advantage” package. Up until know its been hard for them to demonstrate to VMware that real subterranean support exists for the move.

So please head off  to express your interest – I understand the poll will be used to offer hard quantifiable data to VMware. I’m bit concern that this might split the responses – but I will leave it to you – you could register your interest on bringbackvmtn.com and also on the original forum post. You can follow the dialog on the MyVMUG Site as well.

The choice is yours.

Make your voice heard.

As you may (or may not know) I recently tried to trigger a grass roots campaign to try and see if VMware would be receptive to re-introducing the old VMTN Subscription. I must admit I was surprised with the terrific response I’ve received from the community. I’ve tried various community based things in the past with varying degrees of success – but this campaign does appear to be “trending” as the social media folks like to say. I must admit when it only started to take off I was a little bit worried that I might upset my good contacts/relationship with VMware. After all I don’t want to be branded a “trouble maker”. But judging by the response from others, it seems like my initial instinct was right – that there’s a lot of pent-up need/demand for a reintroduction of the VMTN subscription.

 My original post on the Office of the CTO forums at vmware.com now has over 2,700 pages views and over 133 replies – and twitter is busy with hashtag #VMTNSubscriptionMovement coined by Rynardt Spies. I think it would be nice for folks to stop +1 and start to say where both VMware customers and VMware could benefit. According to sources close to VMware, there does seem to be receptive ear to the proposal but the community voices need to be continually and consistently heard over the coming days, weeks – perhaps even months – so the message is a clear and resounding one.

One thing I have noticed I how many people haven’t different ideas on how it could be done, and what the benefits are to VMware. That’s started me think from VMware’s perspective about the advantages, disadvantages, risks and rewards associated with re-opening the program. You see I’m a share holder of VMware stock both directly and via various managed funds – so that often makes me think from both the customer and shareholder perspective.

I guess the biggest fear I would have if I was VMware is unscruplous folks using the VMTN subscription in production – especially if its functionality meets or exceeds a SMB/SME SKU. You could get folks using the VMTN subscription & renewing – instead of purchasing the product properly. It’s precisely for this reason that in our industry evaluations are hard-coded to expire after a limited period. One argument could be that most folks are honest, and the benefits of a VMTN subscription far out way those risks. After all it existed in the past precisely under the same conditions… I think the only way to secure the product from miss-use like that would to perhaps limit its scalability such that the product functionality remains, but its practical use in production would be so limited that it would never be used in Prod. The downside of that is some peoples homelabs touch closely to Production style environments – precisely to make them as realistic as possible. My host currently have a combo of 12GB and 16GB RAM. I’m running out memory and I’m considering an upgrade (unless I can get Dell, HP, UCS to kindly donate new hardware – hint, hint). It would be a shame to do a hardware upgrade, to later find software limited my capabilities.

The other issue is how dice & slice the VMTN. If I was VMware I would be wanting to keep it simple. There’s been a lot of talk about different types of VMTN – core, desktop, management and so on. Here’s what I’m thinking. A “VCP” VMTN design for those working towards their VCP that includes the core features of the vSphere5 platform. Once someone has passed their VCP they would then qualify to “Upgrade” their VMTN subs to be “Certified”. This would unlock the door to ALL the VMware technologies for a yearly sub. This could be seen as facilitating the certification process – and also be seen as a “reward” for attaining” the VCP status. It would acknowledge that self-learning doesn’t begin or end with the VCP and knowing vCenter/ESX. I’ve always been keen to see the VCP and VMUG membership as offering real tangible “benefits”. I guess that also leaves another option – of rolling the VMTN subscription into the existing VMUG Advantage package which has proved so popular in the community.