by Rich Bourdeau
I know VMworld 2014 in San Francisco sounds like a long way off, but the VMworld Schedule Builder has been available for a few weeks and some sessions are already starting to get 
filled close to capacity. To make sure you get in to the sessions that are top on your list start building your VMworld 2014 schedule now. If you haven’t registered yet, register now for VMworld –you have to be registered to access Schedule Builder.
In all there are 25 Cloud Automation Sessions. Ten of the sessions are delivered by VMware customers or partners. Personally I’m headed to the customer sessions from companies like EMC, McKesson, Cleveland Clinic, Asurion, and VMware IT to find out what’s working, best practices and lessons learned. To help you plan your week I have assembled the definitive list of Cloud Automation Sessions that you will definitely want to check out. If you can’t fit them all into your week, remember you can watch them online when you return.
MGT3041 – Building ITaaS – A Self Service Framework for IT Administrators
Monday, Aug 25, 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
David Atkins and Darryl Smith from EMC discuss how they leveraged vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Orchestrator and Puppet to deliver an on-demand IT as a Service framework. In doing so they automated tasks across 7 groups, saving 12-24 hours of manual work, thereby reducing provisioning times from multiple days to under an hour.
VAPP1428 – Hadoop as a Service: Utilizing VMware Cloud Automation Center and Big Data Extensions at Adobe
Monday, Aug 25, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM or Wednesday, Aug 27, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Come listen to Andrew Nelson from VMware High Performance Computing Group and Chris Mutchler from Adobe Systems discuss the delivery of a unified Hadoop PaaS offering at Adobe using vCloud Automation Center. The session will discuss lessons learned as well as plans for additional enhancements.
MGT1969 – vCloud Automation Center and NSX Integration Technical Deep Dive
Monday, Aug 25, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Ray Budavari and Zackary Kielich from VMware will provide you with all the details and design considerations of deploying NSX security and networking services with vCloud Automation Center
MGT2525 – Chasing the White Rabbit all the Way to Wonderland: Extending vCloud Automation Center Requests with vCenter Orchestrator
Monday, Aug 25, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Let Naomi Sullivan and Steve Kaplan from VMware show you how vCenter Orchestrator can be used to adapt existing vCloud Automation center processes as well as extend its capabilities using Advanced Service designer to create custom IT services.
TEX1991 – vCenter Orchestrator – What’s Next?
Monday, Aug 25, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Join VMware vCenter Orchestrator Product Manager Savina Ilieva to get updated on recent enhancements as well as a look into the future strategy and direction
NET3020-SPO – SDDC: From Packets to People: End-to-End Automation and Orchestration of Apps, Ops, and Infrastructure
Monday, Aug 25, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Come listen to Charlie Canno from F5 Networks and Becky Smith from VMware discuss the challenges a configuring network and security services and how VCloud Automation Center can be used to automate delivery of networking services in the context of deploying infrastructure and application services.
MGT2650 – Streamline Infrastructure Management with VMware and Puppet
Monday, Aug 25, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
If you are a Puppet user, you will not want to miss this session delivered by Nigel Kersten from Puppet Labs and Becky Smith from VMware. Learn how vCloud Automation Center and Puppet working together can help simplify the delivery and ongoing maintenance of multi-tier applications
OPT1947 – VMware IT Journey – Moving Enterprise Application Workloads to VMware Internal Cloud
Tuesday, Aug 26, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Grant Nowell and Venkat Gopalakrishnan from VMware IT will discuss how they have transitioned their Dev/Test workloads to a hybrid cloud using software defined services and VMware cloud management software. One of the things I’m particularly interested in hearing is how they transformed their funding process
OPT2089 – Moody’s IT Transformation: The Journey, the Process, Achievements and Benefits
Tuesday, Aug 26, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Moody’s has started their transformation to IT as a Service. Come learn from Rajiv Doshi from Moody’s and Rohan Kalra from VMware. This session will looks at both the organizational and technical challenges and provide guidance and insights gained through Moody’s implementation experience.
MGT2111 – Provisioning to the Cloud with vCloud Automation Center: The Journey to DevOps
Tuesday, Aug 26, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Learn first-hand from Todd Baxter at Asurion the best practices and lessons learned from their deployment of an automated cloud infrastructure and application services. Amjad Afanah will also talk about new vCloud Automation Center capabilities that will allow faster software deployment to facilitate continuous delivery.
TEX1994 – (B-Y-O-D) Bring Your Own Device and We Will Integrate it into Your SDDC Using vCenter Orchestator (vCO) Dynamic Types
Tuesday, Aug 26, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Savina Ilieva from the vCenter Orchestrator Product Management team how easy it is to integrate your own devices and expose them as catalog items in the vCAC Service catalog.
MGT2565 – Supercharge Desktop Mangement – Horizon View with vCloud Automation
Tuesday, Aug 26, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
If you have a large virtual desktop deployment project in your future, being able to rapidly deploy and manage large numbers of desktops quickly will be key to successfully scaling your virtual desktop implementation. Long Wang from VMware will present how VCloud Automation Center the delivery of VMware as well as multi-vendor desktop solutions.
MGT2385 – McKesson OneCloud – The One Cloud to Rule Them All
Tuesday, Aug 26, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Interested in in deploying a secure, multi-tenant Private Cloud? Come hear directly from Luke Youngblood Enterprise Infrastructure Architect at McKesson Corporation and Eric Chiu from HyTrust. This session will walk through their requirements as well as reference architecture for deploying a secure policy controlled private cloud.
MGT1923 – vCloud Automation Center 6 and Storage Policy-Based Management Framework Integration
Tuesday, Aug 26, 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM
Software Defined Storage is a key component of any software defined data center. VMware solution Architects Chen Wei and Rawlinson Revera will present the details of how to deliver Virtual SAN, Virtual Volumes and other software defined Storage services a vCloud Automation Center.
MGT2323 – Infrastructure is Not Enough: Your Path Towards Platform-as-a-Service Cloud Provisioning
Wednesday, Aug 27, 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM
You will have to get up early for this one, but this session looks like its definitely worth it. Come listen to Paul Miller and Randy Evans from Integra Networks Corporation show you how they implemented single click application delivery with vCloud Automation Center.
NET2379 – Dynamically Configuring Application Specific Network Services with vCAC and NSX
Wednesday, Aug 27, 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
What good are virtual machines or applications without the appropriately configured network and security services. If you are interested in automating the delivery of secure, scalable, and high performing infrastructure and application services come listen to VMware SE Grant Orchard demonstrate how rapidly is to configure NSX software defined networking services within the content of delivering infrastructure or applications.
MGT1559 – “SAPaaS: BluePrinting & Provisioning SAP using vCloud Automation Center & Applications Director
Wednesday, Aug 27, 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
Brian Larose from VMware will demonstrate how to use available vCloud Automation Center SAP application to accelerate the deployment of SAP applications.
MGT3095 – vCloud Automation Center and Pivotal Cloud Foundry – Better PaaS Solution
Wednesday, Aug 27, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Cornelia Davis from Pivotal and Vipul Shah from VMware will demonstrate how to deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS services using vCloud Automation Center and Pivotal management capabilities.
MGT2173 – How a Major Healthcare Provider has Built a Multi-Site Distributed vCloud Automation Center Environment as a Reference Architecture
Wednesday, Aug 27, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Come listen to Zeeshan Ahmed from the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi and Shiv Diddee from VMware discuss their distributed deployment architecture of vCloud Automation Center. If a distributed cloud infrastructure is in your future, this is a session you will not want to miss.
OPT2524 – Navigating the Organizational Changes Brought on by Cloud Transformation
Wednesday, Aug 27, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Come listen to two of VMware’s top cloud consultants discuss some of the organizational challenges that they have faced deploying cloud solutions for the US Public Sector market. This session will look at how to review existing processes, soliciting feedback from customers, setting achievable goals the importance of building a roadmap of future capabilities.
MGT3042 – Cloud Automation – Tales from the Trenches
Wednesday, Aug 27, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM
Naomi Sullivan and Steve Kaplan from VMware will lead a panel of IT experts from Medtronic, Qualcomm and Coca-Cola. Come learn from these experts first hand and learn the tips, trips and lessons learned that will help accelerate your cloud automation journey.
MGT2175 – vCloud Automation Center Overview and Glimpse into the Future
Wednesday, Aug 27, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Want to get a good overview of vCloud Automation Center as well as a glimpse into future directions? Then you won’t want to miss this session delivered by Jagannath Krishnan, long Wang and myself.
MGT2487 – Built to be Extended: vCloud Automation Center
Thursday, Aug 28, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Are you tired of being told to throw everything away and start over? Legacy does not mean broken! VMWare’s vCloud Automation Center was designed from the ground up to be adapted and extended to work with your existing infrastructure tools and processes. Let Aleks Ryabin and Matt Young from VMware demonstrate how intuitive and flexible vCAC’s extensibility mechanisms can be by showing you actual examples of customer deployed solutions.
MGT2047 – Planning a High Availability Deployment of vCloud Automation Center
Thursday, Aug 28, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
If delivering a highly available Cloud Service Catalog is in your future, you will not want to miss this session delivered by Carl Prahl and Jason Holmberg from VMware. They will walk you through the process of configuring vCloud Automation Center for high availability.
OPT1812 – Delivering IT as a Service with vCloud Automation Center and a Software-Defined Strategy
Thursday, Aug 28, 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
Come listen to two of VMware’s best cloud consultants discuss how you can rethink your OT and business processes and modernize your IT service delivery capabilities. Using vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Orchestrator, and Advanced Service designer learn how to successfully deploy solutions like: Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) with Horizon View, Storage-as-a-Service, and Networking-as-a-Service for end-to-end ecosystem integration.
