Recently, I have been invited to VMware Test Drive and thought to writeup an article for my followers who got the question like ” What is VMware Test Drive? ” and ” What we can get with this? “. If you are wondering is there a way to access any sandbox VMware solutions for testing purposes or just to try out the real world experience with these solutions, this is the place for that. You can get your hands dirty with the real world lab experiences and also you can integrate the other cloud services such as O365, Dropbox and Salesforce with this Test Drive platform.
VMware Test Drive allows you to access VMware’s full suite of products such as Workspace ONE, Workspace ONE UEM (formerly VMware AirWatch), Horizon, vSAN and Pivotal Container Service. I personally worried about the chances of working with PKS and VMware Tanzu as it has very limited access and it was hard for me to spin up a test lab with my own environment. But still, you can try out one of the best VMware Hands on Labs (HOL) with Tanzu to get started with, if you need to know more about those HOL Labs please feel free to follow my previous article about the HOL.
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First, let’s see who are eligible to access the Test drive platform. At the time of writing this article this service offering is only allowed for below users
- VMware Employees
- Customer and Prospects
- VMware Partners
- VMUG Advantage Members
I personally, impressed with the chance I got and I’d like to thank VMware for allowing me to leverage this wonderful service.
How To Access VMware Test Drive?
To access or get started with VMware Test Drive login to the below web page.
Start working on this is quite easy and straight forward. You can chose a solution track, select the available products in Test Drive and access via a Horizon Desktop.
Once you logged In to the platform you can see the available products under three categories. These are the categories and available products at this time.
- Digital Workspace
- VMware Workspace ONE
- Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM)
- VMware Horizon Cloud
- VMware Horizon
- VMware App Volumes
- VMware Dynamic Environment Manage
- Accelerate Cloud Journey
- VMware vSAN
- PKS (Pivotal Kubernetes Service)
- Intrinsic Security
- VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud
- VMware AppDefense and Carbon Black
Credentials for each access will display after extending the product space. Honestly, it took a while to find the credentials for me as I didn’t pay attention to that space.
As soon as, launched the product simple guides displayed on the screen and it gives us the basic starting steps for the access.
Login to the Workspace ONE with the given credentials.
It listed all the applications and I couldn’t see the product I directly launched in the main window.
I searched in the search box and it appeared in the results page. I launched the application using Horizon client. Here, I had two options, either I install the Horizon client on my computer or launched the web client. I personally prefer to use the web clients unless it’s necessary to install the applications. So used the web client.
Make sure to allow the popup windows here otherwise you won’t notice it’s opening in a new window.
It gave me a dedicated desktop and loaded without a delay. It was quick and loaded in seconds.
And here is my desktop and you can access the pre configured fully functional setup from your desktop.
I experienced a small delay in the desktop which is quite normal in a Remote Desktop connection and not sure, it is much faster with the installed Horizon client.
So I can now access the vCenter Servers, or any applications according to the solution you selected. Most of the links are available in the desktop.
I also noticed a solid set of Knowledge base articles available to give you a walkthrough about the solution and I need to say that in terms of knowledge base and the documents. VMware is doing a great job for the users. Also, if you have a request or needs any support you can raise it through the support.
I got the reply back in few hours and, it is accepted that this is not the production incident and overall the support was quite good. Be patient if you didn’t get a reply to your query.
Overall, it was a great experience and I thank VMware again for inviting me to the VMware Test Drive.
