Juniper vMX Trial - fake news?

Mon Mar 14 18:22:50 UTC 2022

The last time I worked with vMX was several years ago.  The image was 
outdated to the point of having to fire up an older version of VMWare to 
export the two VMs so I could import them back into 6.  The 
documentation barely existed.  I had to figure out which vmware adapters 
corresponded to which vMX adapters.  No one really seemed to be able to 
help at Juniper, even though we ended up licensing the things so we were 
"real" customers of this product.

It looked a lot lot an abandoned project.  So unless something has 
changed in the last few years it's not looking good.

------ Original Message ------
From: "Jon Sands" <fohdeesha at gmail.com>
To: "nanog" <nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: 3/14/2022 14:09:46
Subject: Juniper vMX Trial - fake news?

>Has anyone here actually been granted a vMX trial to demo the thing? Their page makes it seem dead simple (https://www.juniper.net/us/en/dm/vmx-trial-download.html) - just request an account and/or trial and you're off to the races with a 60 day temp license. I've had two customers now asking me if vMX would be a fit for them and my honest answer is I have no clue, because I've been completely ignored by Juniper the two times I've tried to trial the thing.
>
>Spoke to two different colleagues within the past ~6mo who had the exact same experience - sent in a trial request, zero response, not even a denial. I suppose Juniper isn't interested in selling these any longer? It's not like we're signing up with hotmail accounts either, myself and my colleagues have used our business emails that pull up as admin/PoCs on 4 or 5 unique ASNs. I'm not sure what more Juniper wants, but I can find reports of the same behavior from Juniper going back 6 years regarding vMX trials:
>
>https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-April/085229.html
>
>https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2016-April/085231.html
>
>I've been denigrated to downloading some ancient eval version from a stranger's google drive I found in a search result, not much of it is matching up with Juniper's current documentation, but I suppose this is the experience they prefer potential customers to have :P
>
>-- Jon Sands
>MFI Labs
>https://fohdeesha.com/
>