VCF Archives

VMware Home Lab Tokens

December 30, 2025

VMware by Broadcom has now enabled home labs to generate tokens and license VCF 9.

Before the change, when you passed a VCP VCF exam, you were eligible for vSphere 8 and VCF 5.2 license keys, but you couldn’t create any tokens, which prevented you from using VCF 9 beyond the 90-day trial.

In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to generate a Broadcom token you can use in your home lab.

Prerequisites

VMUG Advantage subscription.
Pass a VCP VCF exam.

If you need help studying for the VCP VCF Admin exam, my blog post Passing VCP-VCF Admin Exam goes into detail on how I passed.

Complete the home lab licensing process.

My blog post, VMware Home Lab Licensing, goes into detail.

The Process

Using the same account you used to complete the home lab licensing process, log in to the Broadcom Support portal https://support.broadcom.com/

Go to the following URL https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/alpine-certificate
Click on Generate Token.

You will get a message that additional verification is required. Click Yes.

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VMware Home Lab Licensing

September 21, 2025

One of many advantages of passing the VCP-VCF (VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation) exam is that you can get access to home lab licensing. The license is valid for 365 days and can be used in non-production environments. An extra bonus is that if you also happen to have a VMUG Advantage subscription, you can renew the licensing for another 2 years.

In this post, I will show you step-by-step how to get your VMware home lab licensing after passing a VMware qualifying exam.

The Process

To start, you need to pass the VCP-VCF exam. If you haven’t passed it yet, I’ve created the blog post, Passing VCP-VCF Admin Exam, which covers what I did to pass my VCP-VCF Admin exam.
Once you pass the exam, you will receive an email letting you know that you are eligible for home lab licenses.

Log in to the Broadcom Support portal https://support.broadcom.com/ using the same account you used to register for the VMware exam.

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Passing VCP-VCF Admin Exam

May 11, 2025

I recently passed the VCP-VCF Admin exam, specifically the 2V0-11.25 version, and I want to share my experience with the VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator exam.

I typically don’t get certifications as I don’t really see the point, and it’s often not a very good benchmark of actual skills and understanding. However, with the recent changes to VMware home lab licensing, to gain access to the home lab licenses, you need to have a VMUG Advantage membership and pass a VCF exam. Due to this, I took the VCF Admin exam and passed.

My VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator Certification

This post will share my experience studying and taking the VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 Administrator 2V0-11.25 exam.

Exam Details

There are two exam codes for the VCF Admin exam. Exam code 2V0-11.24 is the older 2024 version. Exam code 2V0-11.25 is the updated 2025 version. I’ve only taken the updated 2025 version of the VCF Admin exam.

The VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 Administrator 2V0-11.25 exam contains 60 multiple-choice questions, and you have 135 minutes to complete the exam. You need a score of 300 points or higher to pass the exam. The exam may contain unscored questions, but you won’t know which questions are unscored.

During the exam, you can flag questions to review at the end before finishing the exam. You can also strikethrough invalid answers by right-clicking them to help narrow down the possible answers.

The questions are pulled from a pool of questions, meaning if two people take the exam, they may not have the same questions. When I took the exam, I only got multiple choice questions however, some of the questions in the pool may be matching or sequencing-type questions.

Studying

To prepare for the VCF Admin exam, I attended six weekly 1-hour weekly study sessions. The study sessions were organized by Franky Barragan and were hosted by James Tiffany, Stephan McTighe, and Gareth Edwards. The sessions followed the official VMware VCP – VCF Administrator exam guide. The official exam guide can be found here.

All of the study sessions were recorded and have been posted to YouTube. Here is a YouTube playlist of those videos. I highly recommend those videos as they were pivotal to helping me study.

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