This release builds on our mission to make EF Portal the most comprehensive and flexible platform for HPC and remote desktop environments: helping both administrators and end users monitor, automate, and manage their workloads more efficiently than ever.

Transition to EF Portal
If you’re using EnginFrame, it can be very beneficial transition to EF Portal, the next evolution of the powerful HPC and VDI portal platform. Built on the same code base as EnginFrame, EF Portal offers a familiar installation process, consistent user experience, and exciting new features designed to enhance productivity and performance. As part of NI SP’s commitment to supporting EnginFrame customers, we offer free migration options and ongoing support to ensure a seamless upgrade experience.

What’s New in EF Portal 2025.2

(PDF Version: What’s New in EF Portal 2025.2)

Administration Dashboard Update

The new EF Portal version introduces a revamped Operational Dashboard with modern graphics, load of the EF server, JVM usage, license view, storage usage, active sessions and jobs and much more! The updated Dashboard offers to monitor the status of EF Portal in one comprehensive view.

You can also select respective data in the graphs to have a closer look. 

User Dashboard (Available on Request)

On request there is a new EF Portal User Dashboard available including configurable cluster CPU load, user sessions, storage, application license status via our license monitoring plugin as well as user job information.

Please see the screenshot below for more information. 

MOTD integration

A regular feature used by EF Portal customers is the Message of the Day. We have introduced a new easy to use MOTD plugin supporting configurable News including styling. 

The MOTD plugin can be enabled in the “Appearance” section in the Administration of Applications or VDI where also the styling can be applied to match company colors and style.

AWS Workspaces Core Integration to Support Office 365 Use Cases on AWS

To enable our EF Portal customers on AWS to use Office 365 on AWS Windows instances we added support for AWS Workspaces Core in EF VDI Portal to enable the

• Creation and management of Windows AWS Workspaces Core instances 
• Starting DCV Session on Windows instances including running the full Office 365 Suite which is supported by AWS Workspaces Core
• Shutting down the AWS Workspaces Core instances after closing the session

including sample pre-submit, starting and closing EF Portal VDI hooks supporting the AWS Workspaces Core integration.

Job Cache Administration Services

New Job Cache administration services in the EF Portal Operational Dashboard help to easily manage the Job Cache. You can now: 

• View Job Cache Errors
• Show Job Cache Content
• Clean Job Cache Errors
• Delete Job Cache Content

These new services make the administration of the Job Cache which supports the performance of EF Portal much easier. Information in the Job Cache will be retrieved from the scheduler or session manager again when cleaned. 

Navigation Menu Folders Customization

It is now possible to add custom services and folders before the default menu services and customize the folder names shown in the navigation for both Administrator and User’s views (see Analytics folder and My Services in the following screenshot). It is also possible to rename and reorder default folders. Here is an example screenshot:

Enhancements for VDI Hooks

We added a number of additional features to improved VDI hook functionality: 

• Added the ability to pass additional requirements from pre-submit hook to e.g. select a dynamically created instance or VM for session placement
• Added configurable timeouts for session hooks
• Execute hook scripts as separate processes instead of sourcing them
• Introduced a default timeout of 30 seconds for closing hook execution

Other Features and Improvements

We have added a number of other enhancements: 

• Remote File Browsing: Last visited folder is preserved across different RFBs in the same service page
• Remote File Browsing: Added the ability to configure a RFB to guide the last visited folder for all RFBs in the same service page
• Remote File Browsing: Show full path in tooltip supporting visibility of long paths
• File Manager: Improved disk space management with automatic cleanup of download spoolers upon completion
• Operational Dashboard: Enable access for HPC Workspace and Virtual Desktop administrators
• Operational Dashboard: Added quick link to the NI SP Support and Knowledge Base
• Operational Dashboard: Enhanced system statistics retrieval to reduce load on the EF Portal host
• Installer: Added umask detection and validation
• File Manager: target address of a .url file can now be opened clicking on the filename
• DCV SM Integration: Added the ability to configure automatic session recovery
• DCV SM Integration: Added comprehensive support for requirements conditions and operators passed as submit options
• LSF Plugin: Improved compatibility to support a wider range of Linux environments and interpreters
• PBS Plugin: Optimized number of queries to PBS server
• PBS Plugin: Added support for Job IDs exceeding 30 characters
• PBS Plugin: Improved compatibility to support a wider range of Linux environments and interpreters
• Added REST service in Admin SDF to retrieve CPU load and Memory usage
• Added new trigger to remove expired REST tokens from database
• Service Editor: Introduced checks for incomplete Service configuration, to prevent launch failures with unmodified default Services
• Service Editor: Improved validation rules and messaging for Max Number of Sessions parameter

Changes / Security / Upgrades

• VDI: Automatically switch to the Session folder when submitting a VDI job
• Changed default output limit for job scheduler XML output from 50MB to 300MB
• Upgraded rrd4j to version 3.9
• Upgraded Jackson JSON library to version 2.15.0
• Installer: Added two-step confirmation when installing EF Agent on a separate host
• Upgraded Apache Tomcat to version 9.0.111
• Upgraded Apache Commons Text to version 1.14.0

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