Take Five With Tom Fenton
Take Five with Tom Fenton: Must-See VMware Explore 2022 Horizon Sessions
VMware Explore 2022 will be returning to San Francisco (albeit with a name new name) this year after a two-year pandemic-related hiatus. It will be held in the newly revamped Moscone Center Aug. 29-Sept. 1.
The last time this conference was held in-person was 2019 with around 20,000 attendees, and it will be interesting to see how many people will be attending in-person this year after being a completely virtual event for the past two years. I personally love attending these live events as it gives me a chance to chat with like-minded individuals, and after the interruption there will certainly be lots to catch up on.
I'll write up two different articles on sessions this year. In this one I'll look through the catalog with an eye towards Horizon sessions, and in the other I'll look at non-Horizon related sessions.
With that said, here are my five must-see VMware Explore EUC sessions from the content catalog.
TAKE 1 The Future Is Bright: Why VMware Horizon Is the Best Alternative to Citrix [EUSB2159US]
This breakout session will be presented by VMware's Gabe Knuth, senior product line marketing manager, and should be exciting to watch. Not because they trash talk competitors (they usually don't). Rather, I like them as they tend to talk about items that actually matter to VDI users and administrators, presenting the case as to why one company's product is better than another's.
TAKE 2 Horizon Cloud Service on Microsoft Azure: Nuts and Bolts [CXS1894US]
I have had the opportunity to work with Linus Bourque (the presenter of this session) while I was at VMware, and he actually set up my first Horizon on Azure deployment. I have always enjoyed his presentation style. As more and more people move toward hybrid VDI environments, I am excited to learn about deploying Horizon on a public cloud like Azure.
TAKE 3 The (Not So) Dark Art of Application Packaging and Profiling [CXS2450US]
This session will be presented by two of VMware's most experienced instructors, Joe Cooper and Linus Bourque, and promises to take the mystery out of two products I haven't had the chance to spend enough time with: VMware App Volumes and VMware Dynamic Environment Manager.
TAKE 4 Architecting Horizon: The Official Reference Architecture [EUSB2087USD]
As this is a 300-level breakout session, it should go deep into the thinking behind the VMware reference architecture.
TAKE 5 Can't Take Your Virtual Desktop to the Cloud? Bring Cloud to It. [EUSB2079USD]
I selected this session simply on the brain trust that will be presenting it: Todd Dayton, senior director at VMware; Justin Johnson, staff solutions engineer of End User Computing at VMware; and Cris Lau, product manager at VMware. These three are all long-time VDI experts and having them all in the same room should be a real treat.
Bonus Sessions!
As I work with ControlUp, which VMware resells as a Horizon monitoring solution, a few of my colleagues and I will be presenting at Explore this year. The Expo Theater session for ControlUp will be Improve Remote Work Experience with Last-Mile Monitoring from ControlUp [EUS2540US].
Our breakout session will be Bad User Experience Smackdown: Easy Horizon Troubleshooting with ControlUp [EUSB2474US]. Last year, we "accidentally "caught a laptop on fire in our breakout session while showing how the Wi-Fi degradation can affect a remote worker's experience. This year we have something equally exciting planned!
For VMTN TechTalks, I will be presenting Monitoring Horizon VDI Clients and Home Networks [VMTN2000US], Increase Horizon Guest Density Using MMR [VMTN1997US] and Is Your Horizon Desktop Available? [VMTN2001US], where I will cover using synthetic monitoring to ensure the availability of Horizon desktops.
A full-event pass includes general and breakout sessions, keynotes and Hands-on Lab (HOL) interactive simulations. An online pass is free with a VMware ID (also free). You can see register for the event here.
About the Author
Tom Fenton has a wealth of hands-on IT experience gained over the past 30 years in a variety of technologies, with the past 20 years focusing on virtualization and storage. He currently works as a Technical Marketing Manager for ControlUp. He previously worked at VMware in Staff and Senior level positions. He has also worked as a Senior Validation Engineer with The Taneja Group, where he headed the Validation Service Lab and was instrumental in starting up its vSphere Virtual Volumes practice. He's on X @vDoppler.