Updated 5.22.19
Coming back from the Nutanix .Next conference two weeks ago, the biggest announcement that really got me excited as the ability for Nutanix Frame to run in AHV environments. AHV comes as an additional environment to AWS where Frame started, Azure and Google Cloud, currently in early release.
I’ll be going thru a multi-part series around Frame and configurations use cases. So stay tuned!
During the Frame Deep Dive session at .Next, I loved the What If question that kept coming up around VDI. What if VDI could be simple yet effective. Secure and resilient. Scalable and User Friendly. I’d like to rephrase that question from What If to Why not? With Frame, I think we have a solution that can meet the majority of use cases, while still providing fast setup and powerful desktops for end users. As the graphic below shows, it’s as simple doing 1-5 .
If you haven’t looked into Frame for a simple and effective VDI solution, you just might be missing out. It’s simple to setup – from signup to desktop availability in a very short period of time. And you can get a free 2 hour test drive to see the solution directly.
Frame provides a cloud-based control plane, meaning all management is done via the Frame portal which is hosted by Nutanix, and VDI resources can be configured to use multiple locations; cloud and on-prem and GPU.
The Frame end user console is entirely browser based, so any modern browser will work. Just for fun, I tried Frame in a beta release of the Microsoft Edge browser for MacOS – and it worked flawlessly!
Frame has great documentation which can be found here, but I wanted to put together a quick series of posts to help get started with Frame.
Configuring Accounts
Once your account has been setup within the Frame Portal, we can go thru the process of setting up Accounts, Organizations and Customers. Frame is entirely hierarchical in the admin console, so you can create multiples at each level and organize based on organizational levels, department levels or even at the Customer level.
In my screenshot below, I’ve setup a hierarchy for demo use, and I’ll show later on where the different accounts come into play.
The base for Frame though is the Cloud Accounts. As you can see in the image below, we get the option for AWS, Azure and Google. Using the specifics of the subscription for each, you can setup multiple cloud accounts.
Once we have setup our Cloud Accounts, we can now associate these Cloud Accounts to an account, which is also the makeup for the displayed URL users connect to. In the image below, notice that this account will use the Azure cloud account that I setup, in the Data Center that I selected. If I wanted to spin up resources in a different data center, I could just create a different account and associate that to an account. Only a single Cloud Account can be configured to an Account at any given time.
We also get to choose our instance type to associate the desktop to.
Cloud Resources
As I mentioned earlier, since Frame can be setup at multiple levels, I’ve decided to setup different accounts for isolation. With multiple accounts, let’s see what’s going on behind the scenes in Azure for resources.
First, we can see that a resource group is created per account.
Additionally, multiple VNETs are also setup. By default, he VNET are setup using 10.0.0.0/16 subnet, which could cause issues in certain scenarios. Thanks to Ruben Spruijt on the Nutanix Frame team letting me know that either during setup, or once an account has been setup, you can customize the VNET settings under Settings > Networking to eliminate address overlap. This is helpful for VNET peering, or if you’ll be extending connectivity into the VNET via a VPN.
And within minutes of getting Frame initially configured, we can see that we have desktops starting to show up, tied to their specific resource group.
The nice thing about Frame as well is that when we terminate Accounts in the Frame portal, those resources are also decommissioned on the Cloud Account side – so no extra work to go back and clean up.
There’s not a lot more to getting Frame setup and to the point where we can start to work with our Sandbox VM, which in Frame is consider our ‘golden image’. More on that in Part 2 and beyond.
- Part 2 – Dashboard and Sandbox
- Part 3 – Desktops and Resources
- Part 4 – Integrating with AHV
- Part 5 – TBD