VMAP Eliminates ESXi and VCenter Lab Installs, Thanks to Greedy Pirates.

I run a class in Virtualization Technologies. My college acquired a VMAP subscription primarily to use to set up our training lab.

We run 18 Dell T110 servers with 16GB of memory.

We also run 18 Dell desktops with 8 GB of memory.

Here is how I (used to) run the 16 week class:

Each student would:

1. Install a 180 day eval version of Windows 2008 R2 on a bare desktop.
2. Install Workstation 8 on the desktop. Introduce students to the concepts of virtual machines. Workstation is great for this.
3. Bring their own 16GB USB drive to class and install ESXi 5.0 on it running on the server.
4. Install VCenter Server (and client) directly on the desktop.
5. Create an additional two virtual ESXi host VMs
6. Create another VM from VCenter Server virtual appliance.
7. Start creating VMs, Clusters, ect.

The point is, each student will be learning a wide range of features offered in VSphere. Each student needs TWO VCenter Server licenses and at least THREE ESXi licenses.

At the end of the class, the lab is torn down (all software uninstalled).

The VMAP subscription that my college purchased recently announced that lab Install licenses are no longer offered for the VCenter or ESXi products.

I can now only use the 60 day version?

There is no way around this?

I could create 50 or so "student users" and get individual keys for each. I would then have to use each key individually on all of the hosts installed in the lab.

The students enrolling in this class were very happy to try out the VSphere environment, something they could not do at home.

Why not just offer lab install keys that have a 1 year life. That woul be more than long enough for any semester length class.

Or does VMware just want to shut down the "non academic partner" classes being offered. The "certified" classes use the same VMAP account from Kivuto however. How are they going to run their labs?