You can now use IAP Desktop to launch database clients and other client applications and let them securely connect to Google Cloud VMs over IAP TCP forwarding.
To use the feature, right-click a VM in the Project Explorer window and select Connect client application. IAP Desktop then creates an IAP TCP forwarding tunnel, launches the application, and lets the application connect to Google Cloud through the tunnel.
You can use this feature with the following client applications:
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SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS): You can launch SSMS and let it authenticate and connect to SQL Server using either Windows authentication or SQL Server authentication. You can use Windows authentication even if your workstation is not domain-joined or if it's joined to a different domain than your SQL Server instance.
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MySQL Shell: You can launch the MySQL command-line client to connect to MySQL servers.
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Chrome: You can launch Chrome to connect to management portals or other websites that are only available inside your VPC on port 80 or 8080.
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Custom applications: You can extend the feature by registering your own applications.
Other new features include:
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Multiple RDP sessions to same VM: You can now create multiple sessions to the same Windows VM by right-clicking a VM in the Project Explorer window and selecting Connect as user.
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Enhanced Properties window The Properties Window now shows additional details about a VM's security settings
In addition, the release includes several stability improvements and fixes, including:
- Several improvements to the dark theme
- A fix for an issue that caused the options dialog to fail when the connection limit was set to lower-than default value (283811054)
- IAP Desktop now closes unused tunnels as soon as they're not used anymore, freeing up system resources
Additional notes:
- Google Cloud is changing the default session length to 16 hours for existing Google Cloud customers. This change affects IAP Desktop and as a result, you might have to re-authenticate more often.
- Future releases of IAP Desktop might only be made available for 64-bit versions of Windows.