Customer requested a solution to automate the deployment of VMware classroom training environment

Manual preparation of the classroom training environment was a time consuming process which needed to be done every Friday evening. At any point, tens of training programs were scheduled for the following week where each training program required the necessary preparation so it is ready to be used by the students. Training programs varied in content and each training program required a customized setup involving as many as a hundred Virtual Machine instances.

The customer was presented with a library of VMware PowerCLI functions that are assembled in a task list to create a separate workflow for each course deployment.

Sascha designed a flexible workflow engine that accepted a text file as input and in turn the engine produced a new course deployment using automated delivery. The solution also enabled quick deployment of new courses involving minor modifications to the input text file, rather than creating a separate workflow engine for each course.

The workflow engine made possible the automation of a manual task which traditionally is prone to human error, time consuming, resource intensive and inefficient. The customer estimated time savings of up to 70% in deploying classroom training environments.