Why I like VMware TestDrive so much (comes with VMUG Advantage)

Nov 9, 2020
Share on:

Hi everyone,

For those who follow me and sometimes chat with me, you probably know that I am a big fan of VMware TestDrive. I don’t hear a lot about it, but I think it’s something great and very useful.

What is VMware TestDrive exactly? To quote them: “With ready-made integrations with some of our most popular ecosystem partners, TestDrive allows you to explore VMware solutions alongside applications and services modeled on typical customers use cases, in a real-world environment.”

What this boils down to, is that you get access to Ready to Use Experiences and some sandboxes, where you have (mostly) full admin access yourself to play around with. Let’s take an example of each:

  • One of the Ready to use Experiences is a VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud desktop that you can log into using Horizon. It has a big lab guide that guides you through everything, and it is lengthy at about 8 hours at the time of writing.
  • You get Workspace ONE sandboxes at the time of writing. This is your own sandbox where you have full administrator access so you can test Workspace ONE. You can even create policies, enroll users/devices and much more.

At the time of writing, there are three categories. Digital Workspace, Accelerate Cloud Journey and Intrinsic Security.

Digital Workspace:

  • Ready to Use Experiences:
    • Workspace ONE
    • Workspace ONE UEM
    • Horizon Cloud
    • Horizon
    • App Volumes
    • Dynamic Environment Manager
  • Sandbox Experiences:
    • Workspace ONE UEM
    • Workspace ONE Access
    • Workspace ONE Express

There are also Sample Integrations:

  • Dropbox
  • Office 365
  • Zoom

Accelerate Cloud Journey:

  • Ready to Use Experiences:
    • vSAN
    • PKS (now known at TKGI or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated)

Intrinsic Security:

  • Ready to Use Experiences:
    • VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud
    • VMware AppDefense and Carbon Black

Now you might ask yourself, what demos and such are there with this?
Well, you can view the guides over at this link, no account required. You just won’t get access to the desktops without access to VMware TestDrive.

TestDrive makes it very easy to demo things. However even more important (to me at least) it gives you extra hands-on experience with lab guides in real environments (the latter is where applicable), for example for the vSAN and AppDefense demos.

Let me know if you want a video walkthrough of one or multiple KB posts of VMware TestDrive, I’d be more than happy to make them. You can find my contact info here.

Of course, EVALExperience is also great, but I do think that TestDrive deserves more credit than it actually gets by the blogging community.

Thank you for reading this and see you in the next post!