Today, we are witnessing a number of companies building or moving their infrastructure to the public cloud. In one of our previous blog posts, my colleague David Horvath explained how you can “Bring Your Own Azure Network to Frame.” With BYO Networking, the Nutanix Frame® DaaS solution provisions Frame-managed workloads in your designated Microsoft Azure® VNet. Access to the workloads in that VNet remains within your private network.

For customers who want their users to access these workloads from the Internet without a VPN, Nutanix provides the Frame Streaming Gateway Appliance (SGA), a secure reverse proxy that supports the Frame Remoting Protocol (FRP) 7 (Secure WebSocket-based) and 8 (WebRTC-based). The SGA allows you to securely grant users access to virtualized applications and/or desktops running in the Azure private VNet without a VPN.

Operating systems can be 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 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® Virtual Apps and Desktops, or VMware Horizon®.

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 their environment.

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

The first entry covered Active Setup. The second entry covered the Microsoft® Store. The third entry covered Services and Scheduled Tasks. In each case, we discussed what each piece is, how it works, and how to optimize it.

This blog addresses Startup Items, which includes Run and RunOnce Registry Keys, as well as the Startup folder that exists in each user’s profile. More specifically, we will discuss their purpose, how they work, and what can be done with them for the purposes of optimization.

We are very excited to share a demo of the new Generic USB Redirection feature of the Nutanix Frame® DaaS solution (which is now available in Early Access with the release of Frame App for Windows 6.7 and later)!

Generic USB Redirection further expands Frame's support for USB peripheral devices, including advanced/specialty devices such as Bloomberg® keyboards!

In this blog we will demonstrate the seamless integration of Bloomberg multi-function keyboards within a Frame session via the Frame App. For those unfamiliar, Bloomberg keyboards are specialized devices used by financial services customers to interface with the Bloomberg Anywhere™ solution. The keyboard not only includes Bloomberg-specific function and menu keys, but also built-in speakers as well as an integrated biometric fingerprint scanner for multi-factor authentication into Bloomberg Anywhere.

Frame® Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) provides a detailed scheduling capability to ensure that Frame accounts are able to deliver just-in-time production capacity while minimizing the additional cost of having idle cloud capacity. However, Frame does not currently have the built-in feature to alert administrators when an existing production pool is running out of provisioned capacity. This might lead to users not being able to connect to a session because all of the VMs in the production pool are in use at a moment in time. This blog will demonstrate how the Frame Admin API can be used to monitor the actual number of concurrent sessions and send a message to a Slack® channel when the number of active sessions reaches a certain percentage of the provisioned capacity of a Frame production pool.

At Nutanix, providing flexibility and the power of choice to our customers is something we pride ourselves on.

With the Nutanix Frame® Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution, customers not only have choice in where they deploy (private, hybrid, or public clouds), but they also have choice in how they procure and pay for their Frame subscription. Customers can purchase a prepaid subscription through our Nutanix channel partners or in a monthly pay-as-you-go model through My Nutanix.

And now, we are excited to announce that we are providing even more flexibility by allowing customers to purchase their Frame subscription directly through the Azure® Marketplace!

Nutanix's Frame® desktop-as-a-service, with its ability to deliver virtual desktops and applications on non-persistent virtual machines, is a key part of the security posture of many customers. When combined with Frame application mode, which eliminates the Windows® Desktop and focuses the end user on a single set of published applications, Frame provides enterprises with a secure way to deliver Windows applications and not lose control of the underlying data. As a part of our Enterprise Profiles capability, Nutanix released a feature that allows Frame administrators to further secure their Frame environment by forcing users with Enterprise Profiles to be logged in as a non-administrative local Windows user. Recently, this feature has been turned into a setting that can be applied to any Frame account that is not using the Frame Domain Join feature.

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 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® Virtual Apps and Desktops, or VMware Horizon®.

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 their environment.

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

The first entry covered Active Setup. The second entry covered the Microsoft® Store. In each case, we discussed what each piece is, how it works, and how to optimize it.

This blog addresses two sections, specifically Services & Scheduled Tasks. More specifically, we will discuss their purpose, how they work, and what can be done to optimize them. These sections of the Windows OS have been around for a long time and while they do not change often, their ability to cause havoc in an environment has been thoroughly documented, see some examples here and here.

The Nutanix Frame™ Platform records session and audit log information on what actions users and administrators are doing in the Frame Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). This session and audit log information is available for download from the Frame Console. Enterprises often want to combine this session and audit event data with information from other sources within their Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution in order to obtain a more comprehensive view of what is occurring in their enterprise. In this blog, we will demonstrate how Frame Admin API can be used within a PowerShell script to retrieve audit data from Frame and insert it into the Splunk® event manager, one of the more popular SIEM's on the market.

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 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® virtual desktop infrastructure.

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 are looking to deliver an even better experience within their 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.

The previous entry of this series covered Active Setup. We discussed what Active Setup is, how it works, and how to optimize it.

This blog addresses the Microsoft® Store platform: its purpose, how it works, and what can be done with it. This particular area of the OS is continually changing and, as such, will require constant management to optimize in a way that works best for your organization. This blog potentially saves even more headaches than any other blog in this series.

Nutanix Frame™ Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution supports multiple networking models. One of the more popular networking models for enterprises is the Frame Private networking model. This model allows the Frame workload VMs to have private IP addresses on the enterprise private network and access private networking resources and it is the simplest way to inherit existing network security processes.

However, remote users still need a way to connect to these private networks. The traditional way of implementing this access is to deploy a VPN, but that requires implementing and maintaining software on the user endpoint devices and VPN connections can overload security products like firewalls.

Frame offers a Streaming Gateway Appliance (SGA) to meet this need, but some enterprises may wish to take advantage of the “security as a service” model offered by Zscaler, Inc. Zscaler offers a “DMZ as a service” solution that can provide DMZ type functionality without the complication involved in many DMZ deployments. The Zscaler® service maintains many certifications required by government agencies and it meets the rigorous standards required by the most security conscious organizations.

In this blog you will learn how Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) and Frame DaaS can work together to provide a remote access solution to a private cloud with a simplified administrative model while maintaining a high level of security.