Last week,  I was ecstatic to receive the confirmation that I will be speaking at VMworld this year – that is on the vBrownBag TechTalk stage.  If you’re not familiar, the TechTalks are 10-15 minute “lightening” talks given by anyone in the virtualization community who has a technology or tech-related strategy to share.  These are completely coordinated by the folks at vBrownBag (huge applause to them!!) with the blessing and help by the VMworld conference crew (again, huge applause!!) and driven by the community at large (yep, here’s to the community!).  These guys are so committed to community and sharing the knowledge and this is a perfect extension of their weekly webcasts.  Two years ago I saw the kickoff of the TechTalks and the enthusiastic reception that followed.  I’ve since watched its popularity grow as the platform has been taken to other conferences (OpenStack Summit) and to the regional VMUG’s (most recently, the Indy VMUG User Conference).

The TechTalk schedule for VMworld 2014 is now online and there are some really neat topics by some amazing folks in the community.  I encourage anyone to check out some of these sessions.  Come support your fellow peers, see the enthusiasm and the passion within the community and learn some cool things.  It’ll all be happening in the VMworld Hang Space.

This year, I will be stepping way out of my comfort zone and stepping up to the plate to offer what I believe is a very exciting topic.  I’ve been delving into vCenter Operations Manager a lot lately, impressed with its rich features offering deep visibility into the VMware infrastructure, monitoring and reporting features, intuitive dashboard displays, capacity planning tools, efficiency and risk analysis, and predictive analytics.  It really is an amazing product.  However, it is only a monitoring and reporting tool – no changes to the environment can be made from vC Ops.  Which means that when it discovers a fault, no action is taken.  This is where vCenter Orchestrator comes into play.

vCenter Orchestrator is a rich automation tool, capable of executing complex workflows.  These workflows could be configured to remediate faults that show up in vC Ops, however there is no native integration between the two.  Not to worry as VMware has come to the rescue and created the vCO Remediation Workflow Package for vC Ops.  This is a plug-in that integrates the two products together.  This allows vCenter Orchestrator to kick off workflows when prompted by SNMP traps initiated by events detected in vC Ops.  Very powerful.  What I will be sharing in my TechTalk is a demo of a use case of this integration.  Of course, squeezing a demo of this remarkable tool into a 10 minute talk will be terribly difficult, but I’m up for the challenge.

Look forward to sharing!