How to get bits&licenses of VMware for vExperts

January 28, 2026 (Last Modified: January 28, 2026)

How to get bits&licenses of VMware for vExperts

First of all, many thanks to the vExpert Pro Giovanni Dominoni for his invaluable help&guide in this process;

I’m in a period of low activity and uncertainty about my future (sadly I’m too poor for the desidered early retirement, yet), and the vCenter 8 running on my *NUC *has broken. Because of this I am trying to get the new **vCenter 9 ISO **and relative **licenses **for try and test the new version on my home lab.

Once upon a time it was very wasy for vExperts: go to

vExpert Application Portal *Before you can access the benefits of the the vExpert program, please login if you’re an existing vExpert, or create a…*vexpert.vmware.com

and get what you need. Now it’s sooo complicated and, yes, you need also to have a VCF certification in order to access VMware products and try them in your lab.

The process is not straightforward. Prerequisites are

you are **vExpert **and have a VCF certification registered with your email address
you are registered with the same address to the **Broadcom **portal
and same as before with the **VMUG **site.

Then you have to access this “secret” url:

Home - Support Portal - Broadcom support portal *Access our Partner Portal where you’ll find the latest in communications, sales & marketing tools, events & enablement…*support.broadcom.com

you will be prompted to authenticate and redirected to a non useful page: paste the “secret” url again in your browser and the page will show you something like this:

here you have to request the license in the right tile (VCF-CLD-FND) (you’ll see request license instead of expiring… naturally)

After some time you should recieve an email with the confirmation of the activation. But be calm and wait for 24 hours.

The day after it should be possible to download the bits, generate update tokens and so on. In my case, I had some troubles that were affecting my account. Asking help on the vExpert General Discord channel was a good idea**: two angels named Matt Heldstab** and ERIC solved all the issues! Many thanks!!!

N.B.: Licenses for version 9 can only be managed by VCF Operations.** That rises a red flag for me: **even if I will be able to install them, they will probably consume most of my NUC resources… but I’ll give it a try.