Frame in 2022: A Year of Milestones and Innovations

2022 was yet another banner year for Nutanix Frame. From new features and enhancements to new partnerships and industry recognition, we’re incredibly proud of our entire team and all the hard work that continues to position Frame as a pioneer and leader in the Desktop as a Service industry.

In total, we deployed 47 releases of Frame in 2022 - talk about CI/CD! 🙂 These releases included new features, enhancements, and bug fixes across the Frame control plane, Frame Remoting Protocol, Frame agent services on the workload VMs, and Frame App.

If you're interested, you can check out all of our releases on our recently enhanced documentation site. You can also subscribe to our mailing list and RSS feed to make sure you're always up-to-date on our latest announcements, release notes, blogs, and newsletters! Simply point your favorite RSS reader here:

• Frame Releases
• Frame Blog & Newsletter

We have also highlighted some of our top updates from 2022 in terms of user experience, management, security, and automation below. Enjoy!

User Experience​

• Frame SSO for Windows Active Directory Domain-Joined Instances.
• Binary input channel support with FRP8 to optimize HID input operations.
• FRP8 support for Linux workload VMs including webcam support, audio redirection, and file upload/download features.
• YUV444 and lossless encoding with FRP8.
• Support for new instance types including D-series_v5 and NCadsA10_v5 machines on Azure, new G5 machines on AWS, and new E2 machines on GCP.
• Support for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS workload virtual machines on AHV, AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• Generic USB redirection support in Frame App for Linux .
• The ability for users to check for new versions manually via the Frame App menu.
• Frame Remoting Protocol 8 (FRP8) support for TCP, in addition to UDP.
• The ability for users to automatically enable sound, microphone, and webcam with Frame App.
• Improved bandwidth estimation for the bandwidth indicator within the Frame status bar.
• Optimized session start time when using FRP8.
• Ability to hide the Frame status bar when in full-screen mode.
• Users can suspend their persistent desktop session and resume the session later if they are running in GCP. Suspended VMs do not incur GCP compute costs; however, the storage costs are incurred for storing the VM memory and persistent desktop disk.

Management​

• Recently enhanced Frame documentation site.
• Test Publish feature that allows Frame Administrators to test the publishing of their Sandbox to a test pool before publishing to a production pool(s).
• Frame Disaster Recovery (DR) backup and restore functionality.
• Tag each provisioned VM in a pool with the ID number of the pool.
• Improved handling of instance availability issues within AWS and Google Cloud in terms of provisioning, reserving, and starting VMs.

Security​

• Secure Remote Access via Streaming Gateway Appliance 3.4.0.
  • Improved network statistics reports in the management dashboard.
  • Additional logs are available in the Logs section of the management dashboard for easier troubleshooting.
  • Improved automatic handling of private and public IP address changes.
  • Additional troubleshooting and monitoring tools are in the Tools section of the management dashboard.
  • Improved network traffic processing scalability on multi-CPU hardware.
  • The health check endpoint now includes a public IP address validation.
• Support for Linux Active Directory Domain-Joined Instances (via LDAP).
• Frame-specific Windows Performance counters, e.g. RDAnalyzer, UberAgent, and other solutions are reporting these Frame performance counters.

Automation​

Deliver an outstanding Developer Experience via well-documented APIs!

• New API endpoint for retrieving Launchpad information and onboarding applications - used by e.g. Liquit and AppsAnywhere Workspace solutions.
• New API endpoints to retrieve Launchpad settings.
• Ability to configure Launchpad instance pools and applications.
• Ability to configure Capacity settings for persistent accounts.
• Ability to manage backups.
• Assign and unassign persistent desktops.

As we look ahead to 2023, we can't wait to see what the new year has in store for us. We're excited to continue innovating and providing the best possible service to our valued customers, partners, and community!

We encourage you to stay tuned for updates and don't hesitate to provide feedback to help us make Frame even better. Thank you for your continued partnership, we're looking forward to 2023 and beyond - it is an exciting time in the world of DaaS!