> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mohammadsiddiqui.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The membership is not the licence - URL: https://www.mohammadsiddiqui.com/vmug-advantage-two-gates/ - Published: 2026-11-07T03:01:36.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-07T03:01:36.000Z - Description: EVALExperience ended in 2024 and VMUG Advantage is structured differently now. There are two gates, membership and certification, and neither opens on its own. What the subscription actually carries, what it costs, and the three things that go wrong. - Author: Sarge Siddiqui - Tags: VMUG, Community, Certification Captured 7 November 2026 Entitlements and figures below were checked against VMUG and Broadcom pages on 7 November 2026\. Programme terms change without much announcement, so check the current pages before you spend anything. I co-lead the Sydney VMUG chapter, which means I have an interest in people joining. I have tried to write the version I would want to read before deciding, including the parts that are not flattering. Someone asks me this every few weeks, usually at the back of a meetup, usually phrased as a yes or no question. Is VMUG Advantage worth it. The honest answer is that it depends on something most people do not realise is part of the deal, and the thing that changed is not the price. ## What actually changed For years the arrangement was simple enough to explain in one sentence. You paid for Advantage, and in return you got EVALExperience: a year of personal-use licences for most of the VMware stack, renewed annually as long as you kept paying. People joined for the licences and stayed for the community, or joined for the community and treated the licences as a bonus. Either way, membership was the gate. EVALExperience ended in 2024\. What replaced it is not worse, but it is structured differently, and the difference catches people out because the marketing has not caught up with it. There are now two gates. Membership is the first one. Certification is the second. Neither opens on its own. ## The two gates Paying for Advantage no longer entitles you to a VCF licence. It entitles you to a discount on the exam that entitles you to the licence. If you join, pay, and never sit an exam, you have bought the discounts and the community access and nothing else. Going the other way is more interesting, and it is the part people miss. If you pass a VCP-VVF or VCP-VCF exam without any VMUG membership at all, Broadcom will give you vSphere Standard, 32 cores, for a year, through the Certification License Portal. No membership, no fee. That is a real home lab on its own and it costs nothing beyond the exam. The membership is what turns that into the bigger entitlement. Pass VCP-VCF while holding active Advantage, and the licence becomes VMware Cloud Foundation at 128 cores, renewable annually for up to three years. Third-party write-ups add vDefend Firewall at 128 cores and Avi Load Balancer at 12 service units to that list. I have seen those figures repeated consistently but not stated on a Broadcom page in those terms, so treat them as likely rather than certain. Renewal is conditional in a way the first year is not. The licence is a one-year grant that you can extend to three, and the extension depends on your Advantage membership still being active at the time. Let it lapse and you are not renewing a licence, you are starting again. ## What the membership carries on its own Set the licences aside for a moment, because for a lot of people they are not the reason to join. - Certification exam discount. One exam a year at half price, which currently works out to $125 off. On a VCP-VCF attempt that is most of the membership fee back in a single transaction. - A free certification exam on site at VMUG Connect events in 2026, with prep sessions alongside it. If you are going to a Connect anyway and you are ready to sit something, this is the single largest line item in the programme. - $100 off a VMware Explore full ticket. - Training discounts: 25 per cent at EnterOne and up to 25 per cent at New Horizons, against 15 per cent for free members. - A Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager Enterprise licence at no extra cost, which is a genuinely useful tool and not a token inclusion. - A Tiyaro DeepQuery subscription. Advantage currently costs $210 a year. I am putting the number here because the decision is impossible to reason about without it, and because every other write-up states it anyway. ## The things that go wrong Three, in the order I see them. **Mismatched email addresses.** Your Broadcom account and your VMUG account have to carry the same address for the two to link. If they do not, the entitlement is invisible to you and the fix is slower than it should be. Sort this out before you sit the exam, not after. **Treating it as a work licence.** It is personal use. Not a dev environment that happens to be at home, not a proof of concept for a customer, not the thing you quietly run a side project on. Personal use. This is the condition most likely to be waved away and it is the one with consequences. **Expecting it to arrive instantly.** The portal takes hours, not minutes, after the confirmation email. Nothing is broken. ## Who should and should not bother If you are chasing a VCP this year, the arithmetic is not close. The exam discount alone covers most of the fee, and the licence that follows is the lab you would otherwise be improvising. If you want a home lab and have no interest in certifying, join only for the training and tooling discounts, and look at the free route first. vSphere Standard at 32 cores for the price of an exam, or VMware Workstation and Fusion, which are now free for personal use and need no subscription at all. If you are already a vExpert, you have a complimentary year of Advantage included, so the question is only whether you sit the exam. And if you are somewhere in an enterprise where the platform team is three people and none of you have a lab that resembles production, the 128-core entitlement is the cheapest way I know to fix that. It is not the same as having the real thing. It is close enough to test an upgrade sequence before you run it on something that matters. ## Where the money goes One detail that is easy to miss and worth stating, since I am not neutral here. VMUG says every dollar of Advantage revenue goes back to the local chapters. The meetup you went to, the room, the catering, the speaker who flew in. That is what it pays for. It does not make the programme worth buying if the entitlements do not suit you. It does mean the money is not disappearing into a vendor's marketing budget. The Sydney chapter runs through the year and the sessions are given by practitioners rather than vendors, which is the whole point and also the hardest part to keep true. If you are in Sydney, come to one before you decide anything. Nobody checks for a membership at the door. ## Sources - [VMUG Advantage](https://vmug.com/advantage?ref=mohammadsiddiqui.com). Pricing and headline inclusions. - [VMUG Advantage Benefits](https://vmug.com/vmug-advantage-benefits?ref=mohammadsiddiqui.com). Full benefit list, discounts and partner entitlements. - [Broadcom, Free Home-Lab Licenses for VMware Certified Professionals](https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/04/14/free-home-lab-licenses-for-vmware-certified-professionals/?ref=mohammadsiddiqui.com). The vSphere Standard 32-core route and the VCF three-year entitlement. - [VMUG, VCP Resources for Certification and License Access](https://vmug.com/hubfs/VCP-Resources-2025-for-Certification-and-License-Access%5FFinal.pdf?hsLang=en&ref=mohammadsiddiqui.com). Exam discount structure, 128-core VCF entitlement, renewal conditionality and personal-use restriction. - [virtualg.uk, Free VMware licenses from VMUG Advantage](https://virtualg.uk/free-vmware-licenses-from-vmug-advantage/?ref=mohammadsiddiqui.com). Third-party detail on vDefend and Avi inclusions, and on the end of EVALExperience. Independent blog, not a Broadcom source. - [VMware Security Blog, vDefend is now a part of VMUG Advantage](https://blogs.vmware.com/security/2025/06/vdefend-part-of-vmug-advantage.html?ref=mohammadsiddiqui.com). vDefend added to the programme.