Simplicity Across Clouds Is Rare
91% of executives are looking to improve “consistency across [their] public cloud environments."
Applications Need to Be Modernized
68% of developers want to expand use of modern application frameworks, APIs and services.
Distributed Work Models Are Here to Stay
72% of enterprise employees are working from non-traditional environments.
Security Is a Top-Down Concern
Risk related to security, data and privacy issues remains the #1 multi-cloud challenge.
Give developers the flexibility to use any app framework and tooling for a secure, consistent and fast path to production on any cloud.
Deliver security and networking as a built-in distributed service across users, apps, devices, and workloads in any cloud.
Operate apps and infrastructure consistently, with unified governance and visibility into performance and costs across clouds.
Empower your employees to be productive from anywhere, with secure, frictionless access to enterprise apps from any device.
Run enterprise apps and platform services at scale across public and telco clouds, data centers and edge environments.
Get on a Faster Path to Prod
Build and deploy quickly and securely on any public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster.
Simplify Kubernetes Operations
Build and operate a secure, multi-cloud container infrastructure at scale.
Pair with App Development Experts
Unlock value by modernizing your existing apps and building innovative new products.
Build, run, secure, and manage all of your apps across any cloud with application modernization solutions and guidance from VMware.
11 Security Practices to Manage Container Lifecycle
Get recommended practices for DevSecOps teams that desire a more modern app methodology.
Connect and Run with Confidence
Reduce time-to-value, lower costs, and enhance security while modernizing your private and public cloud infrastructure.
Enhance Digital Experiences
Securely, reliably, and optimally connect applications in the cloud and at the edge to deliver unique experiences.
Run enterprise apps at scale with a consistent cloud infrastructure across public clouds, data centers and edge environments.
VMware Research: Multi-Cloud Strategies
Learn why enterprises find multi-cloud strategies critical for success.
Deliver an Engaging Experience
Put employees first with device choice, flexibility, and seamless, consistent, high-quality experiences.
Secure Today’s Anywhere Workspace
Ease the move to Zero Trust with situational intelligence and connected control points.
Automate the Workspace
Manage to outcomes — not tasks — with intelligent compliance, workflow and performance management.
Enable any employee to work from anywhere, anytime with seamless employee experiences.
Remote Work Is No Longer Optional
Shift from supporting remote work to becoming an anywhere organization.
Secure & Connect Workloads
Operationalize consistent security and networking across apps, users, and entities with transparency built into our tools.
Protect APIs — the New Endpoints
Increase app velocity and centrally manage, secure, connect, and govern your clusters no matter where they reside.
Be Future-Ready
Get built-in threat intelligence spanning users, endpoints and networks to evolve your protection in a dynamic landscape.
Deliver security and networking as a built-in distributed service across users, apps, devices, and workloads in any cloud.
Protect Your Multi-Cloud Environments
Discover the unique characteristics of malware and how to stay ahead of attacks.
Work with a VMware Partner
Partners deliver outcomes with their expertise and VMware technology, creating exceptional value for our mutual customers.
Become a Partner
Together with our partners, VMware is building the new multi-cloud ecosystem positioned to become essential to our customers.
With thousands of partners worldwide, we are positioned to help customers scale their business, drive innovation and transform their customer experience.
Working Together with Partners for Customer Success
See how we work with a global partner to help companies prepare for multi-cloud.
Many users of the VMware Academic Software Licensing program ask us about how they can most effectively use vSphere in their classroom, especially given the limitations on license keys provided under the Licensing program. It helps to understand the purpose of the licensing program, and some examples of creative ways to use licenses follow.
The Software Licensing program was created to provide end users — primarily students — with access to VMware’s core products. Most directly that means students can download software for use on their own personal machines, either to enhance their day-to-day computing environment or to learn about VMware’s core enterprise-focused products. The program also supports the installation of VMware software on shared physical infrastructure, but only within certain parameters. Most specifically, the program’s primary purpose is NOT to support the deployment of shared infrastructure using free licenses, in part because the lack of support provided (or available) with licenses places an undue burden on local administrators.
Each student user of the Academic Software Licensing program is entitled to receive one license key per product per year, and users can renew license keys prior to their expiration. License keys for desktop products — Fusion, Workstation, and Player — can only be used on a single system, whereas infrastructure products — VMware vSphere — have a ‘capacity’ value associated with the license key, which entitles the user to enable up to that many physical CPUs (typically 4). The number of CPU cores is irrelevant, vSphere licensing is based upon physical CPUs in a server (sometimes referred to in order to reduce ambiguity as to the number of CPU sockets). The capacity of a single license key can be distributed across multiple hosts, e.g., a 4-CPU key can be used to enable two hosts, each with 2 CPUs.
These constraints on license keys mean that a single user can only create a very small vSphere system using their own license keys. While such a small system should still be sufficient for an individual to demonstrate and learn about all of the core concepts of VMware’s products, teachers may wish to build larger systems for use in the classroom. Although the program is unable to provide additional license keys directly to teachers and administrators for that purpose, there are various creative ways in which a classroom environment can be created and managed while conforming to the license agreement.
The core of the vSphere product is the ESXi hypervisor. ESXi is not installed as an application, onto an existing host operating system. Rather, it is deployed into a ‘bare metal’ environment, usually a physical server, and replaces any other OS on that system (dual booting is possible, but left as an exercise for the reader). Thus it is generally not practical to have students install ESXi onto their own laptops or other personal machines unless students have additional machines at their disposal that can be dedicated to a role as an ESXi host. Some classes do in fact provide each student, or group of students, with a physical server that is assigned to them for the duration of the class; another alternative is to configure a machine to boot ESXi from external media.
An alternative, possibly complementary, approach is to install ESXi into a VM running within one of VMware’s desktop (hosted) virtualization products: Fusion (for Mac OS X systems) or Workstation (for Windows PCs). While this typically imposes some additional virtualization overhead on the ESXi system it provides the user with a much greater degree of flexibility, and, most importantly, allows concurrent use of the standard desktop OS while ESXi is running. However, one caveat is that ESXi requires substantial resources in order to be installed: current versions require 2 CPU cores and 4GB of memory. The vCenter management server, which is typically required to manage ESXi, also requires at least 4GB to be usable, and thus a basic system of one ESXi host and one vCenter server requires 8GB of memory. Most current laptop environments do not provide sufficient physical memory to support that within a hosted environment.
Most of VMware’s products can be activated for a 30-60 day evaluation period. This allows administrators to deploy software to physical (or virtual) servers in advance of the distribution of license keys to those servers. Alternatively, some classes may include the installation of software on servers as the first hands-on step in the class. Subsequently, students access the VMAP Software Licensing portal and download license keys for particular products to be used in their class.
vSphere license keys can be deployed to hosts in two different ways: directly to the ESXi host itself, or managed collectively in the vCenter server. For a very small system, up to 4 physical CPUs, it may be sufficient for students to deploy a single license key per system, but in environments where teachers wish to demonstrate concepts using larger systems, the students should be assigned to teams that can combine their individual license keys. In that manner, a team of 2-4 students can collectively contribute sufficient license keys to enable 8-16 physical CPUs across multiple hosts.