VMworld US 2017 – vRealize Automation Recommended Sessions

VMworld14th edition of VMworld US is coming to us on 27-31 August at the usual place, Mandalay Bay Hotel & Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

I play all day with vRealize Automation, so I thought to be proper to have vRA as topic of my first article on VMworld. There are plenty of sessions about vRealize Automation, sometimes it’s hard to decide, so I will signal you what brought my attention this year.

Manage, Govern, and Extend VMware Cloud on AWS with vRealize Automation [MGT2875BU]

Presented by Jad El-Zein, Principal Architect, and Charu Chaubal, Director of Technical Marketing, both at VMware, I totally recommend this breakout session for anyone interested both in vRA and AWS (either VMware Cloud on AWS or native AWS). Jad is blogging on one of the best blogs on vRealize Automation: virtualjad.com. Charu Chaubal runs the team that works on the vSphere product line and is blogging at blogs.vmware.com/vsphere. From official presentation: “Join this breakout to discover how VMware vRealize Automation adds service authoring and delivery, governance, lifecycle management, and enterprise extensibility to your VMware Cloud on AWS service.”

What’s New with vRealize Automation 7.3 [MGT1847BU]

This is another session presented by Jad El-Zein and Naomi Sullivan, Director, VMware. If you are about to upgrade and you are not sure what’s in it for you in the 7.3 version, this is your session.

Best Practices: How the City of New York Has Configured AWS for the Best vRealize Automation Integration [MMC2210BU]

Presented by Sundeep Hiranandaney, Cloud Engineer, Dyntek and Stefan Andrieux, Staff Consulting Architect, VMware, this session comes down to a real world scenario. From official presentation: “This session will give you a deep dive on how to architect and configure your AWS cloud to get the most out of it from VMware vRealize Automation. We will cover day 1 considerations from copying the templates to AMIs and adjusting them to VPC, network connectivity, security, and authorization management. Day 2 consideration will also be covered: backups, reconfiguration, and deprovisioning.”

Automate the Automation: Streamline the Installation, Configuration, and Upgrade of VMware vRealize Automation [MGT1935BU]

Any vRealize Automation administrator knows that installing, configuring and updating vRA is not a walk in the park. So many components, so tight together, so many changes between versions, not a simple architecture, all these turn a production upgrade into a big project. As we all want to simplify these procedures, I’m expecting good content from this session presented by Evgeny Aronov, Senior Engineer, VMware, and Vasil Mitov, MTS, VMware. Official presentation: “… join us for a deep dive in the cool new CLI and API tools of VMware vRealize Automation, which will help you automate installation, initial setup, and upgrade. You will witness the “Never-Ending Automation” real-life, end-to-end demo. It will highlight the power of vRealize Automation extensibility, which we will use to discover new VMware vCenter configuration objects and automatically update VMware vRealize Automation reservations.”

vRealize Automation and Puppet: Enabling DevOps-Ready IT [MGT1307BU]

DevOps is everywhere for some time, so you can’t escape it here either. Mangesh Pangarkar, Director, R&D, and Ganesh Subramaniam, Group Product Line Manager, both from VMware, will deliver a session on vRA and Puppet. To get a sneak peek you can read a blog post by Ganesh Subramaniam, Enabling DevOps with vRealize Automation and Puppet. Official presentation: “By leveraging the new Configuration Automation Framework natively within VMware vRealize Automation, customers can now seamlessly deploy, configure, and manage production-ready applications by using vRealize Automation’s powerful blueprinting/service orchestration governance workflows and request time-provisioning options along with Puppet’s configuration management capabilities.”

Automating NSX for Virtual Machines and Containerized Applications [VIRT2211BU]

I will end my recommendations with a session on NSX (and vRA) presented by Niran Even-Chen, Staff SE Specialist – NSX/Applications, and Mitesh Pancholy, Principal Architect, both from VMware. Niran is VCDX #142 and is blogging at cloud-abstract.com. Goodies from official presentation: “• NSX overview and benefits to applications • VMware vSphere Integrated Containers • Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the leading platform-as-a-service offering • Kubernetes, the open-source container cluster manager championed by Google • Consuming NSX and traditional enterprise applications via VMware vRealize Automation”.

This concludes my vRA picks for this VMworld edition. If you are also interested in VMware Cloud on AWS, you can check VMworld US 2017 – VMware Cloud on AWS recommended sessions.

Constantin Ghioc

I usually play with vSphere API, Ansible, vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, and different AWS tools. In my other life I’m a husband and a father, an amateur photographer and a Go enthusiast.

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