Sina Walleit
By

Last updated on August 17, 2021
  0

Parallels RAS Supports Nutanix 5.15 LTS

As part of the evolution of Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS), and to guarantee compatibility with our main vendors’ new products and versions, we are pleased to announce that the latest Parallels RAS release (17.1 Update 2) now supports Nutanix Acropolis 5.15 LTS, the latest Long-Term Support release of Nutanix AOS. 

Many organizations commonly use Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions due to their multiple benefits. In combination with Parallels RAS, companies can deploy guest virtual machines nearly instantly, optimizing their infrastructure usage and saving time and costs. 

What Is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure? 

Hyper-converged infrastructure is an approach to the data center that collapses compute, storage and networking into one box and manages them through a software layer. With HCI, a hypervisor—running on an industry-standard x86 server—handles all the crucial data center operations in a tightly integrated software layer.  

As is the case with converged infrastructures (CIs), HCI solves multi-tiered IT problems by promising greater scalability, flexibility, and streamlined management in an organization. However, while CIs are hardware-centric, HCI takes the software approach. The software approach in HCI simplifies their architectures. Rather than installing different applications and teams to manage the server, storage, and networking, as is the case with CIs, you can manage HCIs via a single pane of glass.  

Nutanix Hyper-Converged Features and Benefits 

It is advisable to upgrade to the latest AOS stable LTS release to avoid end-of-life (EOL) and experience a more stable and robust platform, providing enterprise standard features and support. 

AOS 5.15 (LTS): Key Features 

The key features available in Nutanix AOS 5.15 (LTS) are listed below: 

Read more about the key features of Nutanix AOS 5.15 (LTS). 

AOS 5.15 (LTS): Key Features

The key features available in Nutanix AOS 5.15 (LTS) are listed below:

Read more about the key features of Nutanix AOS 5.15 (LTS).

Advantages of Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure

Nutanix hyper-converged features and benefits

Nutanix HCI solutions provide a 100% software-defined convergence for all the conventional elements of a data center, including management, storage, networking and virtualization, with no dependency on proprietary hardware.

They are divided into two main components: the distributed plane to deliver resources across all the cluster nodes and the management plane to offer a single and central administration point; hence, a different management solution for each component is not required.

There are several benefits of moving to a Nutanix HCI solution, but, among all of them, businesses are choosing this option due to the following advantages:

Using Parallels RAS Templates

Parallels RAS Templates are used to automate the creation and deployment of VDI desktops and Remote Desktop Session Hosts guest virtual machines. Once the template is created and by using cloning and customization processes, new virtual machines can be created on the fly to host published resources.

During the template creation procedure, administrators will have to choose whether to use linked or full clones. A full clone is a complete copy of the template; therefore, it occupies the same disk space as the template and takes more time to be created. Conversely, linked clones are created faster because they are based on snapshots and they share the virtual disk with the source image.

Clones can be customized either through the Sysprep or RASprep preparation tools. RASprep can be considered as a lightweight version of Sysprep. In comparison with Sysprep, it works much faster because it modifies a lower number of configurable parameters and requires fewer reboots.

Using Parallels RAS Templates provides the following benefits:

A detailed step-by-step guide for adding Nutanix Acropolis VDI Provider in Parallels RAS is shown in the following article Nutanix VDI RAS.

OS support

RD Session Host templates support Windows Server 2008 R2 and later as a guest OS.

Virtual desktop templates support Windows 7 and later as a guest OS.

Further information can be found in the Parallels Remote Application Server Administrator’s Guide.

Any questions? Please get in touch! 

References

Nutanix Hyper-Converged Infrastructure | https://www.nutanix.com/hyperconverged-infrastructure

Nutanix: How it Works | https://next.nutanix.com/how-it-works-22/nutanix-aos-5-15-lts-now-available-37366