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Day-by-Day Recap of VMware Explore 2023

• By Tom Fenton
• 08/28/2023

VMware Explore 2023 was held Aug. 21-24. This year, I was fortunate enough to view it through the prism of a regular attendee, an influencer (author, media and analyst), a presenter and a vendor (ControlUp). My experience wearing all these hats was excellent. I am not a big fan of the hustle and bustle of the Vegas Strip, but it is a great place to hold an event with thousands of participants, and I can always find exciting side trips to take (you can read my article on those here). In this article, I will give you a day-by-day recap of my experience at the conference.

Day 0 -- Monday, August 21
The biggest news announcement for me that was made at Explore is that ControlUp, the company that I work for, announced that Jed Ayres, the former CEO & CMO of IGEL, is joining the company as the new CEO! Jed was able to take IGEL from a smallish, hardware-centric thin client company to a dominant player in the software-only thin-client field. At Explore he was constantly surrounded by people, but I was able to spend a few minutes with him and was impressed by his energy (he has completed six full Ironman races and several ultramarathons) and his vast experience in the EUC field. I am very excited with the direction that he will be taking ControlUp!

Below is a GIF of Jed (left) and me (right) with my coworker's photo bombing us.

I was able to stay at the Venetian Hotel, which opened in 1999 but has been kept up over the years. My room had a spectacular view of clouds brought in by Hurricane Hilary and the High Roller observation wheel. At 550 ft. it is the world's largest Ferris wheel.

I had a little downtime the night before the event, so I went across the street to Davidoff's with a few friends to catch up and watch the traffic on the strip. I do love to watch those high-dollar cars drive up and down the road.

Day 1 -- Tuesday, August 22
The general session kicked off at 9 a.m., with its major thrust being the convergence of multi-cloud and generative AI. The big announcements for the VMware Cloud business unit were how it can operate, manage and monitor multiple clouds as a single unified experience. They announced a few new services such as vSAN MAX, ransomware recovery and extensions to NSX.

The general session (and all keynotes) were streamed live and recorded; you can watch them using your (free) VMware account.

The EUC Solutions Keynote kicked off at 1:45 PM. It ran a half an hour and was entitled "Harnessing the Power of Data and Intelligence for Today's Changing Workplace [EUSK2765LV]." It was a high-level overview of VMware's strategy going forward. This year, it was on the same stage as the general session.

"What's New in Anywhere Workspace" kicked off at 2:45 p.m., which unfortunately coincided with my VMTN talk, "How Fat is your Thin Client?" My session was packed, which surprised me as it was up against the keynote session. Once again, the sessions were MC'ed by Alastair Cooke.

I will be watching a repeat of the other session, as it was full of demos and had all the EUC announcements made at Explore. The big EUC announcements were how VMware Anywhere Workspace platform has incorporated AI to simplify and streamline hybrid work. This includes having a self-configuring, self-healing and self-securing workspace. This new initiative has expanded insights that account for seasonal deviations. They GA'ed their SaaS app availability tool. They announced their DEX playbooks, which are currently in beta, which will provide step-by-step instructions to solve issues. For the management of Intel devices, VMware has integrated Intel vPro management into the Workspace ONE UEM. Appl Volumes, which abstracts the app layer away from the OS. It will work with persistent virtual desktop (this is something that their users have been asking for), supports AVD RemoteApp streaming and Amazon AppStream 2.0 -- both will GA in Q3.

Later in the afternoon I held a book signing for my book on installing and running ESXi on a Raspberry Pi. If you are interested in learning ESXi this is a low-cost way to do so. Thanks to all of you that stopped by the booth.

The final big EUC session of the day was the "Technology Innovation Showcase [K2906LV]." This session had demonstrations of some of the technologies mentioned above.

The Hall Crawl that night was ushered in via a brass band. I worked at the ControlUp booth. Our booth was bustling. I was able to talk about VDI with many people and get a feel for where people were headed with it. Some people mentioned cloud-based desktops like AVD and Desktop 365, but most said they were happy with their on-premises VDI deployments.

XenTegra, Microsoft, PrinterLogic, ServiceNow, 10ZiG, LG, IGEL, Rimo3, Cameyo, HYCU, ControlUp and other leaders in the EUC space sponsored an event at Brooklyn Bowl that night. Everyone had a great time. There was a celebrity red carpet walk, and the band Mr. and Mrs. Smith, was outstanding. The food and drinks were very good. I also enjoyed playing games with my coworkers, customers and some random folks.

Day 2 -- Wednesday, August 23
On the second day, I had booth duty for most of the day, so I only got to sneak out and see a few sessions. My coworker at ControlUp, Jeffery Johnson, and I had a presentation which we had a lot of fun with: "

Troubleshooting Desktops Just Got Less Expensive, Faster, and Easier! (EUS2940LVS)

The No. 1 must-see session on my list was Trentent Tye's "Speed Up Slow Horizon Logons [VMTN2833LV]." Even though it was late in the day (4:30-5 p.m.), he nailed it. It was packed with an overflow crowd, whom he did not disappoint. He also spent more than an hour after the event talking to attendees.

We had a team dinner at Javier's restaurant in ARIA. I mostly like old-school steak houses when I am in Vegas, but Javier's had exceptional SoCal Mexican cuisine, hand-shaken margaritas and mojitos. My chicken enchilada was delicious, and I enjoyed the experience.

That night was the official VMware Explore party at XS Nightclub at the Wynn Hotel and Casino. There was food, there were drinks, there were games and live music, but unfortunately Hurricane Hillary had other plans and the party was canceled after the first hour. But I did get a chance to talk to an upper-level product manager for VMware EUC and he was genuinely optimistic about the EUC product line after the Broadcom acquisition of VMware takes place later this year.

Day 3 -- Thursday, August 24
The last day of Explore was kind of dead so I got to walk the floor on Thursday to meet and talk with some vendors. From the thin-client side, I spoke to Stratodesk and 10ZiG. They all said they were very busy, and people seemed interested in dedicated physical endpoints for their remote and hybrid workforce. From the hardware side, I talked to Lenovo, Dell and others. They said that people are starting to have AI-based conversations and confirmed that it would be the next big thing in computing.

At the end of the event TechTarget announced the VMware Explore 2022 Awards, and ControlUp was the Multi-Cloud and App Modernization winner and the Best of Show Winner!

Post-Event Thoughts
One of the great things about having an event in Vegas is the sheer number of flights in and out of the city; for a change, I was able to catch a direct flight out the afternoon after the conference and was back in my own bed a little after 10 p.m.

I was very pleased with the event. I found it easier to navigate around the Venetian than the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The big announcements were centered around how VMware is using AI in their products and how their products enable the use of AI in other products and AI seemed to be what people were talking about. I look forward to investigating these technologies more in the future and reporting on them.

VMware did announce that next year VMware Explore will be Aug. 26-29, 2024, at The Venetian Convention and Expo Center. I hope to be back and to see you there!