The Thrilling Explore 2025 Hackathon – Innovation Unleashed!

The Explore 2025 Hackathon, held on Monday, August 25th, was a resounding success, bringing together a vibrant community of developers and innovators to tackle real-world challenges and push the boundaries of what's possible with VMware technology. With 67 enthusiastic attendees, including 5 official teams and 25-30 walk-ins, the energy was electric as participants collaborated, brainstormed, and coded their way to impressive solutions. We were also honored by visits from VCF Senior Leaders who witnessed the incredible talent on display.

Our esteemed panel of judges, including Alan Renouf, William Lam, and Edward Haletky, had the challenging but rewarding task of selecting the top innovations. The hackathon truly showcased the power of community-driven development and the ingenuity within the VMware ecosystem, it also ensured newcomers to the event got involved, learned and had fun.

Let's dive into the fantastic projects that emerged from this year's hackathon:

First Place Winner: VCF AI Infra Prompts and Automatic Dashboards

Captain: Dale Hassigner

This winning team envisioned and built an AI interface for VMware products, leveraging MCP to empower Infrastructure Administrators to ask direct questions about their environment. Their innovative solution automates the generation of custom dashboards from the results, using data from RVTools output and scripts run against VCF. This project demonstrated how to turn existing scripts into powerful AI prompts, bringing the benefits of prompt-based interactions directly to VCF Admins and revolutionizing infrastructure reporting.

Second Place Winner: vCheck Revival

Captain: Dario Doerflinger

In a crucial effort to address recent security concerns with free community-based tools like RVTools, Team vCheck Revival focused on updating and revitalizing the popular PowerCLI Health Check script for vCenter. Recognizing its continued heavy usage despite a lack of recent commits, they successfully updated vCheck to work seamlessly with VCF PowerCLI and extended its capabilities to provide a comprehensive health check of the entire VCF stack. In a true spirit of community, this team invited two walk-ins to join, inspiring new members and enriching their learning experience. Their commitment to contributing their fork back to the original repository ensures the community will benefit from their valuable work.

Third Place Winner: vAuditRBAC

Captain: Pawel Piotroowski

This team tackled the critical issue of inconsistent roles and permissions across distributed vCenters with their "Policy-Driven RBAC Compliance for vCenter" idea. Their three-step approach - identify and detect, report, and remediate - aims to ensure consistent, desired-state based permissions and roles, significantly improving security and compliance.

Git Repo: https://github.com/vvpiter/vAuditRBAC

Spotlight on Other Impressive Innovations who won sport prizes:

"Team Bubbles" - Tiered Memory Reporting

Captain: James Warmkessel

Team Bubbles delved into understanding and reporting on tiered memory usage to ensure optimal performance. By reusing community code examples, they developed a Raspberry Pi 5 Monitoring Application, utilizing Powershell and vSphere APIs to provide infrastructure administrators with crucial insights into what was running in tiered memory, helping to prevent performance bottlenecks.

Code Capture with AI

Captain: Tony Foster

This team focused on enhancing the vCenter Developer Center's Code Capture feature. Their idea was to convert raw API call-based code into more readable, AI-generated code. By adding decoration to the code (including object collection) and ensuring connection strings were always included, they aimed to make the captured code more functional and easier for developers to use. The one man team certainly had a lot of fun, which is always a sign of a great hackathon experience!

In Conclusion

The Explore 2025 Hackathon was a testament to the creativity, dedication, and collaborative spirit within the VMware community. We extend our sincere congratulations to all the participants for their hard work and innovative contributions. We can't wait to see what groundbreaking ideas emerge at future events!

Additionally: In true hackathon style we even hacked up an additional directions sign for people to easily find the event!