The following blog is one of a series of blogs that will discuss the integration of third-party User Environment management solutions. This blog will focus on Liquidware ProfileUnity™ profile manager with a Nutanix Frame Desktop as a Service (DaaS) deployment. We will break down the ProfileUnity capabilities and a high-level implementation as follows:

• What is ProfileUnity
• How Does ProfileUnity Work
• Why ProfileUnity with Frame
• ProfileUnity vs Frame Enterprise Profiles
• How to implement ProfileUnity with Frame

The Nutanix Frame™ desktop-as-a-service platform enables customers to implement proper user authentication and authorization security practices with Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) through a set of security roles defined within the Frame platform. In this blog, we'll explain how RBAC works in Frame and discuss the best practices for using third-party SAML2 identity providers and authorization rules to implement RBAC. The Frame-defined security roles specify the level of access to Frame entity types (customer, organization, account) and what can be done in those entity types. Using these Frame roles, you can configure one or more SAML2 or OAuth2 identity providers (IdPs) and then define authorization rules that grant authenticated users one or more of the Frame roles on specific Frame entities.

As enterprises continue to expand their IT footprint into the public clouds, extending existing private networking infrastructure into the public cloud has become more critical. To address the flexibility that this requires, Nutanix has added a Bring Your Own (BYO) Networking feature to its Frame™ Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. In a previous blog, I walked through how to use this feature in the AWS® platform. In this blog, I will walk you through how an environment could be set up in an Azure® cloud infrastructure. Integration between your Frame-managed workloads with an actual private network depends on the specific implementation of your private network.

In my previous blog, I outlined how the Nutanix Frame™ Bring Your Own (BYO) Networking capability in Amazon Web Services (AWS) could be used to deploy a Frame account in a manner that would allow it to be connected to an existing private network. In that post, I deployed a RDP bastion server so that I could access those private Frame workloads from an internet based machine since I had no private network.

In this blog, I will demonstrate how the Frame automated Streaming Gateway Appliance (SGA) deployment capability can be used to grant internet access to those same private workloads so that I no longer need the RDP bastion server to access the private network.

Operating systems can end up being a lot of work for administrators. Work to configure the image, work to install the applications, and work to provide the best user experience possible. As with any software, what is provided to you is what the developer intended, but not necessarily what you want or need for your end users.

This blog series introduces you to Microsoft Windows® Operating System (OS) optimizations, starting with version 1903. I will attempt to keep these optimizations as environment agnostic as possible. Hopefully, these optimizations will be just as good to administrators of physical machines as to a virtual environment utilizing Nutanix® Frame, Citrix®, or VMware® Horizon solutions.

This series aims to share the seemingly infinite number of ways you can optimize a Windows environment, with something for beginners as well as administrators familiar with optimizations but looking to deliver an even better experience within your environment.

Of course the optimizations provided in this blog series are intended only as a guide. Be sure to test the optimizations described in this series internally before pushing the changes to your production environment.

This installment addresses Active Setup: its purpose, how it works, and what can be done with it. This particular area of the OS is criminally underused as a method of optimization. As such, it should provide useful information to a wide range of readers.

Welcome to Part 3 of the “Top 5 DaaS Mistakes and How to Avoid Them” series!

While customers would love nothing more than to consume virtual apps and desktops as a commodity service, the truth is that even in 2021, there are a number of design considerations that ultimately determine whether your Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) implementation is successful or not.

To paint the bigger picture, the following topics have (and will) be covered in this blog series:

• Part 1: Sizing & Optimizing Workload VMs
• Part 2: Single User vs. Multi-User
• Part 3: Data Locality
• Part 4: DaaS in Public Cloud vs. On-premises
• Part 5: User Experience

In this blog post, we discuss the concept of data locality--what it is, why it's important, and how to avoid mistakes regarding it as it relates to designing, and implementing your DaaS environment.

Welcome to part two of Building a Frame Web Application! In the previous blog post we focused on making sure we had the proper development environment set up. We also made our first API call, which successfully connected to the Frame backplane to provide us with information about a resource we controlled. It's now time to develop a deeper understanding of how we're making these API calls, and putting them together to do something that's actually useful.

Microsoft® (FSLogix) Application Masking is a great product to use with Nutanix® Frame Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. Application masking makes centralized image management even easier by hiding the applications based on conditions. With Application Masking, you can install all the applications into a single Frame™ sandbox and then provide access to these applications based on conditions such as group membership and many other options. The benefits are fewer master images, the ability to hide applications when publishing full desktops, and the ability to control application license usage.

“I love Windows User Profiles, said No One, ever”​

Although introduced over 25 years ago, user profiles are still a fundamental part of today's physical Windows PCs and virtual desktop and application solutions. Check out this blog to learn the foundation of Windows user profiles, the pros and cons of different profile solutions, and how to leverage them with Nutanix Frame to deliver the best user experience.

There are contexts in which managing your Frame account by hand isn't enough. Sometimes you need a deeper integration to seamlessly manage all of your services. That's where Frame APIs come in.

In this two-part blog series we will introduce you to the Frame API, both what it is and how to use it. Some programming knowledge is helpful, but not strictly required. The only requirement is knowing your way around a computer.