The VMUG Advantage sub from VMware is awesome. For only $200 you get access to loads of vmware’s products to play with and learn from.
At the moment the sub gets you access to :-
VMware vCenter Server™ 5 Standalone for vSphere 5
VMware vSphere® with Operations Management™ Enterprise Plus
VMware vCloud Suite® Standard
VMware vRealize Operations Insight™
VMware vRealize Operations™ 6 Enterprise
VMware vRealize Log Insight™
VMware Horizon™ Advanced Edition
VMware vRealize™ Operations for Horizon®
VMware Virtual SAN™
And they add new and updated programs to it from time to time, so check out http://www.vmug.com/evalexperience for more details.
I recently subbed to it so I could get my updated home lab setup with vmware 5.5u2 and keep my skills fresh and continue learning how to get the most out of their software.
My lab now consists of :-
A quad core mac mini (with 16GB of ram and two network ports (one built in and one thunderbolt))
An eight core avoton server (with 32gb of ram (ASRock C2750D4I motherboard))
And an Intel Core i7-3930K 6 core powered whitebox server with 64GB of ram.
Storage is provided by a Synology NAS and a Freebsd zfs box, they provide ISCSI and NFS datastores for my vmware lab.
Infonomicon 