Take Five With Tom Fenton

Take Five with Tom Fenton: My VMware Horizon Session Picks for Explore 2023

• By Tom Fenton
• 07/12/2023

This year's VMware Explore, which will be held Aug. 21-24 in Las Vegas, is full of exciting sessions and events.

Explore, like its predecessor VMworld, is a great place to acquire knowledge and new skills by attending some of the hundreds of sessions offered. These sessions are divided into five tracks: Vision & Innovation, Cloud & Edge Infrastructure, Modern Applications & Cloud Management, Networking & Security and Hybrid Workforce.

Below are the five Hybrid Workforce sessions I am most excited about attending at this year's event. I will list my picks from the other tracks in a separate post.

Although Speed Up Slow Horizon Logons! [VMTN2833LV] will be a relatively short VMTN session, this is a must-see for anyone who has anything to do with the feeding and caring of desktops, be it virtual or physical. I work with the presenter, Trentent Tye, at ControlUp and consider him one of the top, if not the top, technologists when it comes to analyzing the bane of every desktop administrator -- slow login times. I have seen him work with administrators to drop login times from minutes to seconds. I have seen a preview of his presentation and am very excited about the information he will be showing. Be sure to book your seat for this session ASAP, as it will fill up early.

Another session that will book early is, Help, my VDI Is Slow -- Boost Productivity with Digital Employee Experience for Horizon [EUSB1227LV]. Cris Lau is a longtime VMware employee, and this should be a terrific session. With remote and hybrid workers becoming the standard, ensuring their VDI experience is as good -- if not better than -- their physical desktop experience is paramount. It looks like this session will help you achieve this.

Jim Yanik is the director of EUC Technical Marketing for VMware, and John Kramer is an EUC staff solution engineer at VMware. I had a chance to indirectly work with both of them while I was at VMware and consider them some of the company's most technically knowledgeable employees. Their session Troubleshooting Your Horizon Deployment [EUST2685LV] should be very insightful. Both gentlemen work directly with customers daily and understand the pain points many Horizon customers have and, more importantly, how to remedy them.

The previous three sessions dealt with maintaining existing Horizon deployments, but the cloud is becoming more and more common for Horizon, so the subsequent two sessions deal with the future of Horizon and how and where it will be deployed.

Horizon Cloud Service and Microsoft Azure: DaaS Like Never Before [EUSB2734LV] promises to discuss use cases for Horizon and Azure. I hope this session is more than a high-level sales pitch and digs into some of the actual implementations of it.

I have had the opportunity to sit in meetings with Angela Ge, director of product management at VMware, and have always been impressed with her. In What's New in Horizon 8 and How to Upgrade Today [EUSB2168LV], I am sure she will do a fantastic job laying out the new features in Horizon 8.

These are my top five Hybrid Workforce events for this year's VMware Explore. I will also present two sessions at this year's event, and I think many people will find my session How Fat is Your Thin Client? [VMTN2822LV] interesting as I look at the resource utilization of the different OSes you can run to connect to virtual desktops.

To register for VMware Explore, click here; for the complete catalog, click here.