Mike Laverick started a campaign last week on the VMware Community Forums and asked for the VMTN Subscription to be reinstated, coincidentally the same request came in through the VMUG board. For those who have never heard of the VMTN Subscription program it was similar to MSDN and enabled you to run VMware software in your lab environment for a fixed yearly fee. Ever since the program was cancelled every now and then people asked for it to be reinstated. This time it is different, it is not a few people who are backing the request but so far the community thread has over 10 pages worth of comments and there are literally multiple new blog posts about this topic every day.
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:
I love how VMware recognizes and listens to their active community.
Looking forward to seeing the details as they are worked out.
Thanks for the heads up!
Nice work Duncan! I really respect how VMware listens to its customers, crossing my fingers that they bring this back!
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This is great.
And still no native Mac client even though it has a ton more responses…favoritism!
I look forward to VMTN coming back, I miss it.
Well, this is a valid request compared to a [cough] MAC client…
There’s a webclient which is the way forward.
This is great news, really looking for to this. Hope you will be to share some output from your midnight meeting!
One of the big limiting factors I face in adoption new VMware technology is the learning curve.
This isn’t VMware’s fault; complex and cool stuff takes time to learn.
At work, I’m leering about purchasing a new, and probably expensive, VMware product because of the time the product will sit out of production while we learn it and fit it into our environment. The 60 day trials are a help, but not enough for me to really feel comfortable dropping it into production.
Having a subscription service for development and learning would be a _massive_ incentive for me to learn more and probably use more VMware products.
Wow, this is the coolest thing I’ve heard in a while! I hope they do this. I hate having to reload my lab every 60 days.
VMTN will definitely help an individual/customer to gain hands on experience on VMware products before they decide to put it in production..