VMware Explore Las Vegas – Hackathon 2025

The VMware Code Hackathon is a special event that took place during this year’s Explore in Las Vegas. Whenever I am allowed to go to an Explore I’m excited if there is a Hackathon. In the previous years we’ve taken part as well. This year was our first time in Las Vegas and we had a blast.

Team vCheck

The Hackathon took place on monday evening right next to the registration hall for VMware Explore. There was plenty of pizza and drinks to be had and we had a huge room. Unfortunately the attendance was not as good as I had hoped. However, we came to have fun and we’ve succeeded in that.

Our team consisted of the following:

• Marco Mattei
• Matthias Grasmuck (arrived straight from the airport)
• Daniel Stadelmann
• Myself
• Two Walk-Ins from California that joined our team at the event

Our Project: Long live vCheck

Everyone in our industry knows about vCheck. The project was running for quite some time back in the day and then it slowly faded away. We at soulTec forked vCheck a couple of years ago into our internal GitLab and kept working on it. As part of this year’s hackathon we decided to publish all our efforts and try to merge them back into the original vCheck project and also try and make it work with VCF 9.

It turned out this was a bit too ambitious for a short evening. As we were joined by two walk-ins we had to re-organize ourselves. In order for them to see anything we started a teams-session where I shared my screen and allowed them to see what I was doing with the PowerCLI code.

Marco was busy trying to get this merge to the original project going. We’ve had so many conflicts that all had to be sorted manually that it took him all evening and even then he did not finish.

Daniel was already working on the presentation at the end and Matthias was busy trying to stay awake after flying in from Switzerland on the same day.

Results

Even though we did not succeed in meeting our ambitions we still had some success. Our work is published here: https://github.com/virtualFrog/vChecker and the original project can be found here: https://github.com/alanrenouf/vCheck-vSphere.

The merge back into the vCheck project is still ongoing at this time.

However, due to our efforts and sociability by accepting walk-ins to our team we’ve secured second place at the hackathon. The price was a nice raspberry pi set.

We’re already looking forward to next year’s hackathon!