Great news for long-time VMware vSphere customers: the free SLES for VMware entitlement is now retroactive for almost all customers currently active on vSphere 4.0 U2 or later.
When initially announced last year, access to SLES and ongoing patch downloads were offered to customers that purchased vSphere after June 9, 2010. With this recent change, VMware is extending rights to SLES for practically all customers current on SnS.
Please see the official VMware announcement for all the details.
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You might like note (The official VMware announcement didn’t mention this either) that the vsphere licenses need to be purchased direct from VMware. I tried all ours, and we are non eligible as we purchased through IBM with our hardware.
Error states “Product license keys that were free, purchased through an OEM, obtain by manual fulfillment or provided by a subscription fulfillment are not eligible for this offer.”
Wayne.
Wayne,
actually it all depends on your support contracts: did you purchase VMware vSphere SnS or IBM support packages for vSphere? If you have purchased IBM’s support for vSphere than unfortunately you are not entitled.
Alberto
Our keys show as ineligible too; we originally ordered full licenses from Dell (the order was not in conjunction with hardware) in 2005 when they were still just a reseller and have full VMware SnS (we havent ever bought any oem bundled licensing or support, and haven’t ever renewed SnS through them either.) I guess technically our VSphere 4 keys are provided by a subscription fulfillment though since we have been a customer since ESX 2?!?
Either the eligibility tool is screwed up or VMware is really missing the boat on this deal. I ran this whole thing up the chain a couple weeks ago and nobody seemed to know for sure who is supposed to be eligible. It’s the most confusing mess I’ve ever seen!
Well, so it turns out our eligibility is OK. We did purchase from Dell but have always purchased support from VMware directly. (Make sure you check your SnS SKU’s agains the eligibility list!) But apparently we hit some other bug in the eligibility tool that is now fixed — Thanks to Eric and Alberto for all of your assistance on this.
John,
Great to hear, and thanks for persevering through that ordeal. You helped identify a glitch in the system that is now fixed, helping many other customers.
Eric
P.S. Sources say it was the Flux Capacitor, but don’t quote me.