by Rich Bourdeau
Don’t miss out on the cloud automation sessions you want to attend. I put together a list of the important, must-see, cloud automation sessions that you will not want to miss. I’ve organized them by day and time, because you are going to need to make some tough decisions. The good news is that if for some reason you can’t attend a specific session, many are recorded and all will have slides available after the Also don’t forget to register for your sessions using the VMworld Schedule Builder as so of them fill up quickly.
Saturday
- SDDC6402-BC – Software-Defined Data Center: Hands on with the Experts
Saturday, Aug 29, 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM
VMware will teach a 1 day rapid fire bootcamp session covering the Best Practices of SDDC and view into components Virtual Networking, Virtual Storage, Virtualizing Applications, the creation of Service Catalogs, Automation and Cloud Native Apps (CNA). Students will have an opportunity to take several hands-on-labs to help with their skills in these areas. This day will give you the in-depth experience with Solution Engineering and the technology to drive solutions into your SDDC.
PLEASE NOTE: If you are staying in San Francisco, Shuttle service will be provided to and from Palo Alto, 7:00a.m. at Moscone North for this workshop. Held at VMware HQ, 3425 Hillview Ave. Hilltop A Lobby, Palo Alto, CA 94304
Sunday
- PAR6421 – Best Practices For Deploying IaaS with vCloud Suite and vRealize Automation
Sunday, Aug 30, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Two part session focused on how to set good expectations around an upcoming cloud IaaS initiative and how to start the journey by managing your current virtualized environment. With vCloud Suite you can not only gain cloud operating efficiencies but also have a way to being the process for where you are today.
Monday
- MGT5913 – How VMware Improved Developer Productivity with vRealize Automation to Deploy the vRealize Automation Application Stack
Monday, Aug 31, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
Is your application too complex for automated deployment? vRealize Automation is all about taking complex systems and modeling them in such a way as to make governance and lifecycle management of your application exponentially easier than a manual approach. But what constitutes “complex”, anyway? Is it lines of code? Is it number of interconnected systems? Perhaps its how many arrows an orchestration flowchart contains? The vRealize Automation team decided to find out just how complex is “complex”, and see if vRealize Automation’s toolset was up to the task. We’d like to share the results with you.
- OPT4680 – Advanced Automated Approvals Use Case – Using vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation to Seize Back the Approval Charter
Monday, Aug 31, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
This session shows how integration with vRealize Automation and providing approval focused vRealize Operations dashboards allows those responsible for approvals to retain their charter, while also demonstrating the value and ROI that automation brings to them through dynamic policy centric dashboards VMware experts will walk you through the technical solution created for, and implemented by, a VMware customer tackling the approval charter challenges of operational transformation and overcoming the natural resistance encountered.
- OPT5519 – Nimble Automation in a Regulated Environment: Good, Fast, and Cheap. Pick Any Two.
Monday, Aug 31, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
A moderated panel discussion with three major insurance companies headquartered in California discussing different strategies to implementing automation in a regulated (healthcare) environment. Each of the companies have undertaken a major IT automation initiative in 2014 and have achieved different levels of success with a variety of tools. Expect a lively unscripted dialog with an opportunity for Q&A from the audience.
- OPT5238 – VMWare IT DevOps Transformation: A VMware on VMware Showcase
Monday, Aug 31, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
VMware IT transformed its DevOps in 2014. This talk focuses on the architecture and delivery system we put in place, moving from a traditional SDLC model to DevOps model.
– How VMware IT managed the project, technologies and automation in DevOps world
– How this initiative transformed the IT organization structure, roles and skills of our staff
– How this transformation enables time-to-value and feature velocity
- VAPP6253 – Forrester Total Economic Impact of Automated Application Deployment
Monday, Aug 31, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Increasingly companies are realizing that they need to automate more than Infrastructure as a Service. They need to automate the delivery of complete application environments in order to empower their developers and test engineers to deliver new applications quicker. Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) study presents an independent objective view of the benefits of vRealize Automation automated application deployment compared to the processes that companies were using prior to deploying cloud automation solutions. This panel session will explore the findings of the study as well as the perspective from companies who are automating their application delivery process today. - MGT5360 – Introducing Application Self-service with Networking and Security Using vRealize Automation and NSX
Monday, Aug 31, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM
This session will cover the self-service catalog delivery of applications and infrastructure including their on-demand networking and security needs through integration of VMware’s vRealize Automation and NSX solutions. Learn how to solve your IT demand challenges by reducing service delivery times from weeks to minutes. - MGT5635 – Improve IT Outcomes for your Business with vRealizes Automation
Monday, Aug 31, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Listen, learn and ask questions of our industry-leading expert customer panel as they discuss the achievements attained, challenges overcome and lessons learned from driving to deliver measurable outcomes with their adoption of vRealize Automation (vRA). In this panel, we will focus on the net impacts of automating application and infrastructure delivery. Specific areas of focus will include: advice on getting started with vRA from ground zero, including pre-requisites for a successful implementation; lessons learned for defining service catalog and its consumers; reasonable expectations for driving standardization into infrastructure resources to automate broadly and drive business impacts; internal blockers to success of automation and process change. - MGT6527-GD – Cloud Automation with NSX Networking and Security with Becky Smith
Monday, Aug 31, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Group Discussions are a good way to join together with peers, guided by a VMware expert, and discuss a VMware key topic as selected by the group. Come to this session prepared to dive-in, engage, and share best practices.
TUESDAY
- MGT5956 – vRealize Automation Blueprint Unification
Tuesday, Sep 1, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
VRA historically had ‘Infrastructure Blueprints’, ‘App Services Blueprints’ and ‘Service Blueprints’. This session talks about how these blueprints are getting unified with best of all worlds incorporated into a single Unified Blueprint. The new Blueprint is the VRA cornerstone concept that brings all elements of SDDC together to let the administrators and architects model basic infrastructure as well as complex multi-tier applications using a single blueprint concept. A brand new design canvas is used to author the new blueprints and it gives a total makeshift to network elements with special emphasis on NSX integration. Session also talks about how to treat blueprint as code, manage blueprints among multiple VRA instances and share our plans around TOSCA.
- MGT5931 – How to Drive the Intelligent Provisioning and Operation of VMs Using vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations
Tuesday, Sep 1, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
As end-users provision more and more VMs, operations teams struggle with performance issues, capacity waste and maintaining service levels. Learn from our customers on how vRealize Automation and Operations work together to solve this problem.
- MGT5318 – Becoming a vRealize Automagician: Why Automation isn’t Automatic
Tuesday, Sep 1, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
For vRealize Automation (vRA) managed environments, becoming an Automagician means leveraging vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) to extend native automation. Applying custom properties effectively in vRA to invoke workflows included in the vRA plugin for vRO, the Automagician gains the ability to incorporate automation and transcend the need for manual processes while removing the error-prone human factor in much of the decision process. This session will delve into the symbiotic relationship between vRA and vRO, and how custom property attributes in vRA can be used to power workflows within vRO for enterprise-scale automation. This session includes a customer panel of Automagicians from the Defense Contract Management Agency, LDS Church, and Fannie Mae
- MGT5973 – Automate the Deployment of NSX and Micro-Segmentation: A Deep Dive
Tuesday, Sep 1, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
VMware has collaborated on the design and deployment of many self-service network provisioning platforms. These platforms offer user-controlled application micro-segmentation and self-service provisioned virtual machines, with a wide range of technology and software including vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, and VMware NSX. We will demonstrate the capabilities of such a system and provide best practices for automating micro-segmentation in your own environment. - OPT4992 – VMware vRealize Code Stream: Is DevOps about Tools or Transformation?
Tuesday, Sep 1, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Organizations are implementing DevOps to accelerate new software releases. VMware vRealize Code Stream is a new tool that accomplishes that goal by performing three basic tasks: automate, automate, and automate. Indeed, vRealize Code Stream automates the entire software release process: infrastructure provisioning, software build, and testing cycles. These automation steps can be executed across all environments: development, testing, staging, and production, helping to ensure consistency across all environments and prevent issues due to human errors. But is that all there is to DevOps? As this is a new paradigm and a new way of operating, the organization will also need to transform. After all, DevOps disrupts the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) as we know it. Organizations implementing DevOps must also apply operational methodologies that will clearly define the transformed processes and document the evolving roles within the IT organization. While the primary focus of DevOps is on automating the release process, there is little emphasis on other operational considerations like monitoring. This session will provide practical guidance on a larger set of operational considerations to fully address the Ops component of DevOps.
- MGT4801 – Using Configuration Management Tools (Puppet, Chef, Ansible Etc.) with VMware Automation
Tuesday, Sep 1, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Are you able to deploy real world applications rapidly to meet your business needs? Join us to learn how to easily model and automate delivery of modern applications to your private or public clouds. By utilizing vRealize Automation and Configuration Management Tools (Puppet, Chef, Salt etc.) together, you can build, deploy and configure standardized multitier applications within minutes. Once these applications are deployed, ongoing management and maintenance is essential. We will show you how to manage drift, roll out updates, and ensure consistency in your applications, thus reducing outages and unnecessary downtime. - OPT5222 – Keys to Successfully Marketing and Managing Your vRealize Automation Service Catalog
Tuesday, Sep 1, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
You’ve just implemented your shiny new cloud platform. You’ve enabled that scary self-service capability your users wanted and you’ve got a service catalog where they can go to help themselves. Join us and explore ways to improve the management and marketing of your vRealize Automation Service Catalog, and drive adoption to keep your users coming back for more. Key reporting features; metrics and measurements for effectively managing and governing services are shared and discussed. New roles and responsibilities are highlighted. User behavior, adoption rates, utilization patterns are addressed. Service marketing plans are shown, facilitating your efforts to create competitive services sales strategies to safeguard users from going to external SaaS providers. Finally, real-life examples showing the benefits of these changes are discussed.
- MGT5563 – Automate the Deployment and Testing of vRealize Automation Configurations, Templates and Workflows Using vRealize CodeStream
.Tuesday, Sep 1, 5:00 PM – 6:00 PMThe vRealize Automation platform has large sets of entities & specific configurations spanning a variety of components. These entities can be complex and require precise configuration in order to work. Are you struggling with lifting and shifting configurations between various vRA environments? Do you need to keep vRealize Automation environments in sync, even across global data centers? Do you wish there was an automated way to deploy and test vRealize Automation configurations? This session will show you how vRealize Code Stream can deploy vRealize Automation configurations across a set of instances, with testing at every stage to guarantee success
Wednesday
- MGT6046 – Designing and Building a Private Cloud for the US Department of Defense: A Customer Case Study
Wednesday, Sep 2, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
A technical discussion on building, securing and most importantly using a private cloud for one of the most demanding customers in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Join us as we discuss some of the challenges faced and lessons learned in the design, build and operation of a vRealize Automation based private cloud for the DoD. We’ll cover some of the DoD specific security requirements and how they were addressed in both the design and build phases. See some of the non-standard design choices made in building the cloud and what requirements they were meant to address. Finally we will cover what to do with the cloud, most blogs and reference architectures stop with being able to deploy a simple Windows or Linux VM. That is not going to cut it for any real organization, we’ll share some examples of custom workflows and blueprints and discuss day two operations.
- SDDC5839 – vRealize Automation or OpenStack? Uncovering the Right IaaS for Your Business
Wednesday, Sep 2, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
This session provides and overview of vRealize Automation and OpenStack, compares use cases, benefits and advantages to help customers decide which IaaS automation is right for them (or both)
- MGT5734 – Getting to Cloud Prescriptively: EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and VMware vRealize Automation
Wednesday, Sep 2, 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
The EMC Hybrid Cloud solution is designed to provide a basis for IT transformation to Cloud-based Services by removing many pre-requisite design and engineering tasks related to large scale cloud automation. Learn how (yyy company) implemented their hybrid cloud strategy in zzz weeks to make automation of their cloud deployment the onramp to success, instead of the entire journey. We will address the business drivers, previous implementation challenges, and how the EHC helped deliver results. Take a deeper dive to learn more about the vRealize Automation catalog, its approvals and entitlement policies across the infrastructure, and how to develop advanced cloud offerings to extend beyond the EHC solution content. - NET5362 – Enabling Automated Network & Security Services with NSX and vRealize Automation
Wednesday, Sep 2, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
NSX enables organizations to streamline network and security service provisioning within the Data Center, while vRealize Automation integrates with NSX, providing out of the box automated provisioning of different network types, plus security and load balancing services at application deployment time. There are several key use cases for this integration and in addition these capabilities can be extended by leveraging vRA components such as the Advanced Services Designed and the Extensibility Framework. This session is focused on real world use cases for NSX and vRA, plus using vRA extensibility to consume advanced NSX network services.
- MGT6020 – Customer Best Practices for How to Build, Automate and Operate Clouds Using the vRealize Cloud Management Platform
Wednesday, Sep 2, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Learn about how customers have delivered a self-service cloud using the vRealize Automation, Operations and Business products by: Automating everything for not just initial provisioning but full lifecycle management, using operations data and analytics to drive automated remediation and optimization, and driving convergence and sharing across IT silos and more efficiency.
- MGT5780 – High Availability, Authentication, and Wicked Fast Install with vRealize Automation
Wednesday, Sep 2, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
This session will cover updates to the HA architecture with the latest release of vRealize Automation, as well as changes to HA deployments as a result of new features coming in vRealize Automation. We will review changes in how vRealize Automation enhances authentication and identity management, and wrap up with a review of the upcoming deployment wizard.
- MGT6535 – Introduction to the vRealize Automation API and Command-Line Tools
Wednesday, Sep 2, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Do you like what vRealize Automation can do but want to offer a customized self-service experience to your end users? Or do you wish you had an easier way to make routine updates to your configuration based on changes in your environment? The vRealize Automation API and our command-line interface, vRealize CloudClient, can help you do this and much more. We will show how you can leverage the provisioning and life-cycle management capabilities of vRealize Automation through a RESTful API. We’ll also demonstrate how to extract data from vRealize Automation for reporting or monitoring purposes, and how you can use CloudClient to handle common tasks such as managing reservations, business group membership, and other configuration that changes over time.
- INF5845 – Strategies, Design, and Best practices for DataCenter Automation
Wednesday, Sep 2, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Which DataCenter Automation products, designs, and processes will help our DataCenter run more stably at Scale? Are there Out of the Box DataCenter Automation solutions that I can use Today at my work with confidence? If you answered yes to either question, then you Need to attend this session led by VMware PSO. The session provides field tested Strategies, Designs, and Workflows to automate DataCenter Operations including VM deployment, 2nd day functions, and monitoring based on insight gained from hundreds of field deliveries. - MGT5151 – vRealize Automation or VMware Integrated Openstack or Both?
Wednesday, Sep 2, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Which IaaS platform is right for your organization? vRealize Automation or VMware Integrated Openstack or combination of both? The focus of this session will be to familiarize you with vRealize Automation and Vmware Integrated Openstack features and concepts. We will provide customer examples of common use cases as to when you would use one or the other. Most importantly the different consumption models each solution provides. We will help to answers the question “What does my end user what to see? Portal? API?” and “How virtual networking with VMware NSX integrates into both solutions. For those interested in operationalizing your private cloud, you will also learn how vRealize Operations and Loginsight can assist with day 2 operations for both vRealize Automation and VMware integrated Openstack. Experts in both vRealize Automation and VMWare integrated Openstack will be presenting and answering your questions throughout the session. - SDDC5566 – Successful DevOps for the Hybrid Cloud with vRealize Automation & VMware Integrated OpenStack
Wednesday, Sep 2, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
VMware vRealize Automation offers powerful capabilities to automate the hybrid cloud. VMware Integrated OpenStack offers production-ready OpenStack on vSphere, itself a powerful hybrid cloud automation platform historically aligned with DevOps. Key challenges exist in determining how to integrate the two and when that makes sense. VMware Professional Services Organization shares key insights, strategies and design patterns for fully utilizing these offerings.
Thursday
- OPT4707 – Integrating vRealize Automation with ITSM and Service Catalog Tools
Thursday, Sep 3, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Many IT organizations are grappling with the decision on which service catalog tool they should use: the one from vRealize Automation or the one from their ITSM tool, i.e. ServiceNow, Remedy SRM, HP Service Catalog, etc. Based on real world experiences, this session describes different implementation options and their pros and cons and common integration points between vRealize Automation and your ITSM tool.
- OPT5029 – How to Use Service Definitions in VMware vRealize Business to Build Highly Effective, Service-Based Cost Models
In this session, your speakers will:
• Demonstrate how the interaction of VMware vRealize Automation service-based blueprints with service definitions in VMware vRealize Business effectively implements cost models
• Provide a deep dive on why allocating costs to the component structure of services when creating service definitions increases cost transparency and enables more accurate costing of services
• Show why accurate determination of the unit price of services is key to tracking cost by the amount consumed, as well as managing usage You’ll leave this session with a clear understanding of the role well-defined service definitions play in delivering tangible business outcomes. - MGT6001 – vRealize Scale – Scaling vRealize Automation to Ten Thousand Managed Machines and Beyond!
Thursday, Sep 3, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
Growing your private or hybrid cloud to tens of thousands of machines?? Looking to manage tens of thousands of machines from a single-interface? In this session, learn about designing a deploying an architecture which will take vRealize Automation to ten thousand machines and beyond. We will start with the minimum scalable architecture and walk-through the process required to scale the system up to a support configuration for fifty-thousand machines. We will walk through the choices made in designing this architecture, discuss best practices, tuning options and limitations. - HBC5240 – Techniques and Best Practices to Establish, Manage and Operate Platform as a Service Using Pivotal Cloud Foundry (CF) and vCloud Air
Thursday, Sep 3, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
During the last year I have helped a number of large enterprise customers, including Pivotal, on-board their development operations to public clouds in order to increase agility and realize the benefits of Platform as a Service (PaaS). As a result, I’ve collected a number of techniques and best practices to help operators establish their platforms. Our goal is to deep dive into the best practices and lessons learned of establishing, managing and operating a PaaS using Pivotal CF on vCloud Air.
