Windows 7 Migration Just Got Easier with MokaFive Suite 3.0

Today, MokaFive hit a significant milestone: the release of MokaFive Suite 3.0.

We began pilots over two years ago with some early adopter customers. Since then, these customers have gone into production – in some cases even increasing the size of their deployment – and now they’re beginning to see real, tangible business benefits from a centrally managed, distributed execution approach to desktop virtualization:

• A Silicon Valley-based international law firm saw its employee satisfaction ratings skyrocket
• A Global investment banking and securities firm whose traveling executives can carry one laptop (either a  Mac or PC) for both work and personal use

I point to these customers because their feedback has been absolutely critical for what we are delivering in version 3.0. This is the next-generation evolution of our product. We have made it Windows 7 ready, truly integrated into the enterprise with more policy controls and security features, and we hope to get more leverage from a market perspective with a multi-tenant managed services model.

Full Windows 7 support.

In my recent blog about the costs of Windows 7 migrations, I argued that this massive IT disruption could be a golden opportunity to future-proof the management architecture. And with 3.0, we’ve given IT leaders just that.

Rather than having to go from one desktop to the next and one office to the next over a 12 to 30 month period to manual upgrade machines, enterprises can implement MokaFive Suite to create a full Windows 7 VM that runs on existing hardware – and still access legacy applications – without waiting for the hardware refresh cycle. This means no additional capital costs to migrate to Windows 7, and companies can refresh hardware on their own timeline.

MokaFive’s Windows 7 support is not just a container. We now have full layering support on Windows 7 both in terms of AD domain join layering, OS layering, user-installed apps, data and settings.  We have changed the architecture of the layering so that it leverages some of the inherent features of Windows 7 much better.

Data center to endpoint security.

In the past, we’ve often talked about our seven layers of security, but for MokaFive Suite 3.0, we upped the ante with security at the device level.

With server hosted desktop virtualization solutions, you can secure the data in the data center, but how do you ensure that the browser accessing the VM is not being screen-scraped at the endpoint? Back in August, we announced a partnership with AVG to solve exactly this security gap; MokaFive Suite 3.0 now takes advantage of this full integration. The solution includes a secure virtual encrypted desktop container that can be deployed to the endpoint and further be secured from key-logging and screen-scraping attacks from the host machine by the AVG security scanning capability. Now virtual desktops can be a secure container that can be accessed by many devices, both corporate and personal.

Desktop management as-a-service.

We’ve been talking to some managed service providers that wanted to be able to leverage MokaFive Suite to deliver desktop management services to multiple organizations and their end-users. It seemed like a great idea, so we created a multi-tenant infrastructure as well as new reporting tools and the ability to delegate management to any tenant.

We see 3.0 valuable to three types of providers:

• Outsourced services firms currently using “brute force” to manage desktops for their clients. Now, with a single platform, they can increase the operational efficiency of their delivery model.
• Service providers and carriers that want to expand their footprint with a client or to add a new revenue stream.
• Hosting companies that have no specific desktop management expertise but want to add more services and move beyond providing just rack space.

These are the three big-ticket items in version 3.0, but we have many, many more features. Check out Brian Madden's latest blog post for more info and video interview.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing



Get ready. Start. Migrate.

We’ve entered the final quarter of 2010, the time when Gartner anticipates most Windows 7 migrations will start in earnest. They’ve done extensive number crunching on the costs of Windows 7 migrations, and many other analysts have further reviewed these findings and prescribed their remedy to ease the pains, if not the costs entirely.

Windows 7 migration is expensive.

No matter how one dresses it up, there’s no hiding the plain truth: IT organizations are being asked to budget an extra 20% to 60% to their costs over the next two years. In addition to the well known costs such as new hardware and Windows 7 licensing, there are many hidden costs with Windows 7 migration.

First, there is the cost of identifying which applications to migrate and when? This is a hard, time-consuming task. Even though Windows 7 is supposed to be backwards compatible, the reality is that many applications still do not work flawlessly.

Second, there is the cost of maintaining both Windows XP and Windows 7 environments for a protracted period, which can be up to two or three years for some organizations based on their migration schedule.
Lastly, there is the cost of migrating personal data. In many work environments, there has been a blurring of the personal and the corporate. Windows 7 migration brings this issue to the forefront, since IT has to decide what and what not to migrate.

There is a silver lining. Windows 7 migration also provides the best opportunity to clean up.

While the list of problems with Windows 7 migration seems endless, a migration project provides IT with the opportunity to upgrade its management architecture, enforce better data usage guidelines, and offer greater user flexibility.

The question becomes, which solution can really solve the problem? Virtualizing the desktop can significantly speed up image deployment. Gartner suggests going with a hosted virtual desktop (HVD or server hosted virtual desktop), but at the same time argues that it is expensive, and what you are saving in migration costs you are adding in capital costs.

The alternative approach (MokaFive’s approach) is to virtualize the desktop, but instead of putting it on a server, you send it back down to the endpoint for local execution, thereby eliminating the datacenter requirement. With this approach, you have no additional capital costs. You simply take your existing machines and deploy a Windows 7 virtual machine environment to them. Your users now have Windows 7 environment without having to wait for your hardware refresh cycle. The best part is that the users can still use the Windows XP on their host machine to access legacy applications.

Refresh hardware on your own timeline: Traditionally, with Windows 7, customers are left with the hard choice of either forklift-upgrading their machines or refreshing their hardware. Instead of trying to speed up the refresh, you can use MokaFive to deploy a Windows 7 LivePC on top of your existing machines until they need a hardware refresh. Even if your refresh cycle extends beyond 2014, you will be fine, since your users can be provisioned with a Windows 7 environment on their existing Windows XP machines. Then when the refresh happens on a true Windows 7 base platform, the Windows 7 LivePC can be moved in minutes.

Provide users with platform choice: With virtual desktops, you can now implement programs such as BYOC or offer employees the choice to bring in the much-desired Mac. You can leverage the migration project to get out of the device management business. Let users bring a device, and you manage the secure corporate virtual image on top of the device. Best part, unlike HVD, users are free to work online or offline.
Separate work and personal: Windows 7 migration gives the ideal opportunity to start enforcing best practices around user data. With a virtual desktop approach, users can move their personal data to the host machine, allowing you to lock down the virtual desktop.

Future-proof yourself: In IT, change often means cost and pain. But a hugely disruptive change like Windows 7 is also a golden opportunity to implement a 'future-proof' management architecture. Even if you muscle through a Windows 7 migration by 2014, what happens with the next big upgrade? By upgrading your management infrastructure to a client based virtual desktop solution, you can not only ease the next upgrade cycle but also get huge TCO benefits while at the same providing more choice to your users.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

Local CPU is becoming MORE important

I caught up this week with Intel's technology evangelist, Charlie Milo, at the Intel Developer Forum, for an update on some of Intel's exciting new technologies, including accelerated 3D graphics, 3D television sets, 3D photos and cameras. One of the items that was showcased at IDF was Internet Explorer 9, which was released by Microsoft in beta yesterday.

Inevitably in our conversation, we discussed the impact of having such a browser; that is, one that renders graphics beautifully on the endpoint, on desktop virtualization. Through that discussion, it became clear that this browser will use a lot more CPU cycles to deliver the high-definition graphics and 3D images that we, the consumers, want. The question then becomes, where do you want this processing power to be executed? On an expensive server sitting in a data center, or on the endpoint?

Rendering rich 3D graphics requires a lot of power and speed, and more importantly needs to be computed close to the user for a rich, interactive experience. The data crunching can happen on the server, but in terms of rendering the graphics, it has to happen on the endpoint.

To me, these rich interactive performance applications further validate the bet we have placed on the client side, where virtual desktops are executed on the distributed resource.

How do you think the coming new browsers will impact desktop virtualization?

  Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

VMworld 2010: Great Show

It’s officially over! For us, VMworld 2010 was an exciting ride.

Day one started with a bang when Network World named MokaFive BareMetal the Hottest Virtualization Product at VMworld. Even though our booth (#1736) was in the far corner of the show floor, we had a crush of traffic visit the booth to learn more about MokaFive. There was a lot of the excitement and buzz about MokaFive especially around our recent announcements on BareMetal player, our partnership with AVG and our MSP beta program. In addition to the high volume of booth traffic, we had a great set of conversations starting with The Register in the morning, Forbes in the afternoon, and a sprinkling of industry analysts throughout the day. Then there were meetings with prospects and partners that went into the wee hours of the morning. The great food and wine at Marlowe just made it even better.

The excitement continued into day two, three and four. The session on VDI TCO caught my attention. It was truly revealing and entertaining. The speaker said, “don’t bother trying to justify VDI on the basis of TCO, find alternative justifications like security etc.” Now that is what I call clean speaking. This just reinforces my conviction that the MokaFive datacenter-less (distributed) approach is the right way to go. Among other attractions, both Brian and Gabe from brianmadden.com stopped by the booth to discuss BareMetal , we had a surprise visit by our angel investor, Vinod Khosla, and Dale did a radio gig on Internet Evolution.

Net-net the predictions I made in the previous blog turned out to be nearly correct. The messaging was cloudy and VMWare killed CVP officially. But contrary to my prediction there weren't as many open source application companies. Well two out of three, ain't bad.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

It’s Official: MokaFive Goes BareMetal

Regular readers of this blog will recall that in June, we blogged about MokaFive BareMetal Player, which we were taking the wrappers off for industry insiders at BriForum. At VMworld we made our bare-metal preview official and demoed it to an appreciative audience. 

This comes, of course, at an interesting time. Just last month in its earnings call, , VMware killed its bare-metal hypervisor.  And just last week, Citrix decided to package its long-awaited XenClient bare-metal hypervisor with XenDesktop in an effort to get it to market faster.

With all the news, our bare metal solution was received as a welcome change.  The sentiment was echoed by Timothy Prickett Morgan of The Register in his eloquent (and irreverent) coverage of VMware, Citrix,  MokaFive and more.

We developed MokaFive BareMetal Player because our customers are asking for a solution that lets them forget about everything except the VM. They want to be able to run directly on the hardware and they want the same management they’re used to already with MokaFive Suite. And that’s exactly what we have with bare-metal: it provides a thin management layer that sits on the baremetal hardware, thus eliminating the cost  burden of managing additional OS’s and licenses.

Best of all, MokaFive BareMetal adheres to our commitment to deliver “choice computing.” In the bare-metal world, that means supporting a broad range of hardware—not half a handful of narrow configurations, and certainly not hardware deals cut in the backroom to lock customers in.

We believe our BareMetal will be a real game-changer in the desktop virtualization space. Like MokaFive Suite, BareMetal is designed to fit into existing infrastructure and to always be OS- and hardware-agnostic.

Take a look at this link of John Whaley’s video chat with Brian Madden at our VMworld booth. Generally, the response to BareMetal has been on par with Brian’s reaction – great! NetworkWorld even listed us as one of the hottest Vendors at VMworld.

 Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

VMworld Predictions

As I previously noted, next week’s VMworld will be MokaFive’s first showing in two years. We’re putting the finishing touches on our booth and prepping our demos. While we count down the days, I want to share some thoughts on what I predict will come out of VMworld.

1. Cloudy messaging around cloud. You don’t have to be clairvoyant to see this one. VMworld 2010 will be all about the cloud, so expect to see everyone putting out some “cloud” story—whether they have a cloud offering or not. As such, expect to sift through these myriad messages for what’s real, what’s pure marketing and what’s simply lipstick on a pig. Despite best efforts to align with the cloud story, the plain fact is that cloud is not an all or nothing model.

As an example, let’s look at desktop virtualization—which is, after all, what we know best. While server virtualization is a key component of the cloud-based delivery model, on the desktop side, the cloud discussion can take an interesting turn. Too often, the most obvious approach has been to take a desktop, virtualize it and then put it in the cloud. But, keeping in mind that cloud is not “all or nothing,” how about just centralizing the management in the cloud, but still keeping the desktop with you.

2. VMware goes back to basics. Based on recent earnings and (non) developments and news from VMware, I anticipate that it will go back to its comfort zone and core competency: the server. Like all vendors, VMware fell prey to the trends—and why not, since they have the revenue and clout. But the reality is, VMware’s business is the data center. They will refocus (or reaffirm) their server play, including server-side desktop virtualization (VDI).

3. Open source ecosystem. Expect a lot of smaller open source type plays to jockey for a position to fill into VMware ecosystem either around open source management or open source application development. They’ve seen VMware move into open source software and open source tools, so they will be want to a part to play in this.

That’s it for my predictions. The last food for thought I will leave you with is the VMware vs. Microsoft match up. VMware has openly declared war on Microsoft --but just how exactly will VMware message this at the show. I cannot wait to hear what VMware will say in its keynote.

What do you expect to see or hear at the show this year? I will be hanging around MokaFive’s booth (#1736), so would welcome your thoughts in person. This has always been one of my favorite shows, and I am excited for some real dialogue with some of the best minds out there.

Of course, we will also be demoing the MokaFive Suite, our new multi-tenancy capability and an exciting peek into a new forthcoming product that I believe will be a real game-changer. And we also will be giving away an iPad. Swing by for details.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

MokaFive, AVG push the secure corporate perimeter to personal devices

Last week, we announced a joint solution with AVG to add one more layer of security to MokaFive which allows distributed virtual desktops to be quickly deployed to and safely run from any machine - corporate or personal. This solution extends MokaFive’s capability of running encrypted virtual desktop containers on the endpoint by further securing them from key-logging and screen-scraping attacks from the host machine with the AVG security scanning capability.

While there are a number of drivers for this integration, the key driver is securing the increasing number of personal devices that are constantly accessing sensitive corporate data. Whether organizations like it or not, they have to support ubiquitous access to stay relevant. Current solutions fall seriously short. Let’s start with VPN. Trying to secure access from personal devices using VPN is futile, since all it does is punch a hole from a dirty container into a clean datacenter. Next let’s look at server based desktops (VDI) and apps or terminal services. In each of these solutions, the data is sitting in a nicely protected container in the datacenter. For added security, let’s assume that there are military guards outside the datacenter. If all this secure data is ultimately being accessed by a browser from a dirty personal machine, then it can be screen scraped. Might as well toss out all the protection. The third approach is to distribute bootable USBs or CDs with a browser. This approach is secure, but cumbersome for the user, and more importantly, the image cannot be managed or updated.

As I have mentioned before, security cannot be talked about in absolutes. But if a company wants to enable access of corporate data from personal machines,; the best solution seems to be to have a secure, managed container provisioned to the personal machine. This is exactly what we are doing with the combined AVG – MokaFive solution. The corporate environment is captured and encapsulated in a virtual desktop (called LivePC in MokaFive parlance) which is then deployed to the personal endpoint. The encapsulation has built-in AV scanning that provides continuous protection from keyloggers and screenscrapers that might be present on the host machine. The scanning is running continuously during VM operation to ensure constant protection. All access to the corporate data is made available only through the VM container. Now, the user has the flexibility to use both corporate and personal environments on their machine, and the corporation has complete assurance that all the data is secured.

With this solution, enterprises can now finally extend the secure corporate perimeter to personal machines. Check out the press release.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

Manage Desktops from the Cloud

Over the last two years, we’ve been helping our customers -- many of them very large brands with thousands of users -- succeed in rolling out the MokaFive Suite to their employees. Today, we’re taking the first step to make our virtual desktop management solution available to smaller companies – by enabling MSPs to offer desktop as a service with MokaFive Suite Service Provider Edition.

As part of this roll out, we’re opening up our beta program for managed service providers (MSPs) that want to offer desktop management from the cloud. Service Provider Edition includes capabilities that would allow an MSP to manage multiple customers on a single platform. As such, we’ve architected our core offering on a fully multi-tenant infrastructure, added reporting and enabled delegated management for MSPs.

This is great news for MSPs in that it can improve operational efficiencies of their desktop delivery and enable them to offer desktop management as a service at a lower overall cost. Many desktops in the world today are not managed within the enterprise, but managed by outsourced providers. This is due to the economies of scale (and skill) that can be achieved by outsourcing vendors as they pool managed desktop services across many companies.

There are other desktop management service offerings on the market, of course, but most of them have focused primarily on using the VDI-based model where both the desktop execution and management are in the cloud. As we have discussed in previous posts, that approach has inherent deficiencies such as no offline access and a poor end user experience. What we offer with the Service Provider Edition is desktop management services from the cloud, while still allowing for the virtual desktop to be executed locally and to be available online or offline.

That’s why we felt it was important to bring the power of centrally managed, locally executed MokaFive LivePCs to the channel, enabling our MSP partners to offer this technology to their customers.

If you are an MSP interested in joining our beta program, click here.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

MokaFive at VMworld

This year’s VMworld conference is fast approaching, and we are beginning to feel the excitement as we prepare to participate after a two-year hiatus. Over the past couple of years, we’ve been focused on three key areas: refining our product, gaining customer wins, and raising awareness of MokaFive.

First, on the product front: I am proud to say that over the last two years, the team here has built an enterprise-class product with all the capabilities, scale, security and robustness to manage enterprise endpoints.

Second, a good product translates to customer wins, and we have started to see a big ramp up in production deployments. We've spent the last two years working very closely with our customers to solve the complexities of managing desktops and enabling choice computing for end users. We’re now seeing customers who initially bought into the concept of server-based desktop virtualization saying the model is too complex and not cost effective. MokaFive’s approach of centralizing the management of virtual desktops and having them execute locally at the endpoint - irrespective of the type of endpoint - is actually gaining a lot of traction and truly validating the strategy we’ve established.

Lastly, we recently raised a round of funding this past April to add to our successes. We are now in a place where we can focus on raising awareness of the product and of MokaFive as a company. With a robust strong product and a great, referenceable customer base, I feel we can put our foot forward strongly and confidently.

As we look ahead to VMworld in less than two weeks, we’re excited about the quality of conversations we expect to have with CIOs, IT managers, sys-admins and end users about desktop virtualization.

If you are planning to attend VMworld, come by MokaFive’s booth (#1736) to see a live demo of MokaFive Suite, learn more about MokaFive’s BareMetal Player, and enter to win an iPad. You can also follow our our Twitter stream for updates before and during the show.

We look forward to participating in VMworld 2010! Stay tuned for our next VMworld blog post where I will predict the emerging themes and trends that will be discussed at the VMworld show.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

Going Green with Virtual Desktops

Everyone is talking about Green IT these days, and virtualization is a popular way to save money and reduce your environmental impact at the same time. Many companies have already discovered the benefits of virtualizing their servers, so the natural progression is to begin looking at virtualizing their desktops, as well.

There are several environmental benefits to using virtual desktops, but it all depends on the type of approach—whether you’re using server-based (VDI) or client-based virtual desktops. In the past, we have blogged about the shortcomings of VDI, such as cost and lack of offline support. From a Green angle, the problem with VDI is the huge datacenter infrastructure it requires, and more servers mean more space, increased power consumption, and increased cooling costs. The additional servers required by VDI more than offset any green savings you might see, and as a result, VDI is actually less Earth-friendly than traditional desktops. In contrast, a client-based solution (like MokaFive) requires no additional datacenter infrastructure.

Let’s compare the green impact of MokaFive vs. VDI. Gartner predicts that 49 million endpoints will be virtualized by 2013. Let's assume 30% will be laptops and remaining will be desktops. Based on those assumptions if all of those desktops were virtualized using MokaFive (instead of VDI), we would prevent 7.8 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year—that’s the equivalent of taking 1.4 million cars off the road per year!

Another environmental benefit of client-based virtual desktops is the need for fewer machines. Virtualization allows you to use existing machines for multiple purposes: for example, an employee can use the same laptop for home and work. As a result, you can avoid the carbon footprint of an additional machine, including the energy and cooling it requires.

In addition, telecommuting is growing in popularity, and virtual desktops are helping to drive that trend. With centralized management, IT can easily support remote workers’ desktops, and employees have the flexibility of accessing their corporate desktop anytime, from any machine. Remote workers are environmentally friendly, too: they take cars off the road, and they save on office emissions (consider the space, energy, and cooling that each cubicle requires).

Desktop virtualization is a great way to reduce your IT costs and help save the environment at the same time. Just keep in mind that the type of virtualization approach makes a big difference, and client-based virtual desktops are by far the greenest option.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

VDI Project? One question to make sure you ask.

We recently hosted a CIO summit that was attended by several CIOs, representing some of the largest organizations in the US. The topic was desktop virtualization, and we had a terrific discussion about ongoing initiatives at each company.

One CIO cited a statistic that was so surprising, shocking really, it really stuck out in our minds. At their organization—one of the premier universities in the world--they’d recently evaluated the use of VDI for university employees. In their analysis, they found the all-in cost of VDI to be nearly $12K per user per year! (sound of jaws hitting floor) When contemplating the necessary server, storage and network improvements, the costs were so prohibitive they dismissed VDI as being completely impractical.

His argument was so sincere and thoughtful that other attendees were heard making mental notes to ask their staffs for a business case on their VDI projects.

If you’re considering, planning, or even deploying VDI, one piece of advice: make sure you ask this question too. If you don’t have a staff, then ask yourself. Or ask your boss. Just don’t let the question go unasked and risk a rude $12K surprise.

Overheard, five years from now: "Tell me again, why did we spend so much on VDI?"

As the story goes, during the 1960s space race, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronauts needed a pen that could write in the gravity-free environment of space. After a $1.5 million effort, they developed the Astronaut Pen which could write in a vacuum, write with no gravity, and write in extreme temperatures. It was brilliant!

The Russians, faced with the same problem, had a simpler approach: they used a pencil.

This apocryphal tale contains a valid lesson: sometimes we spend a great deal of time, effort and money to create a “high-tech” solution, when a perfectly elegant and low cost solution is right before our eyes. (Of course, one clear alternative to VDI springs to our minds. J)

Question: how many abandoned VDI projects are littering the streets?

The CIO’s comments resonated with many of us, as we’ve heard, particularly recently, of many organizations that have investigated, piloted and ultimately abandoned VDI because the costs were so prohibitive, and because better suited alternatives do exist.

So we ask the question to all of you: how many of you have gone through this experience and ultimately decided to go with status quo or an altogether different approach?

Burt Toma, Director of Products

VDI post on Madden: good observations, different conclusions

Last month, I predicted that VDI will be just a niche play as the cloud matures. Yesterday Brian Madden posted a dramatically different perspective about the extent to which VDI will penetrate computing.

This perspective was not his own, but he thought it interesting enough to write about it. The problem though is that although the observations are reasonable, the conclusions are awful.

Let's look at specific examples.

First, the post notes that computing is changing rapidly, and of course I agree. More apps are moving toward the cloud for simplicity and portability reasons. The apps that will be left behind are rich applications that require local execution. The problem with VDI in this scenario is that you get the worst of both worlds: you get neither the simplicity of the cloud app, nor the functionality of a local app. It just doesn’t make sense to take your fat desktop and stick it into the cloud (except in niche scenarios), since VDI will only become more cumbersome as the cloud matures.

A second observation in the post invokes Moore’s law, saying that as servers become better and cheaper, the cost of VDI will drop. This might be true if users continue to use the same applications, but that’s not how computing works. Applications will continue to expand and consume the additional server bandwidth, negating any savings from Moore’s law.

Thirdly, the post goes on to describe deployment models. The primary pain point that desktop virtualization solves is desktop deployment and centralized management. With a client-based solution, IT can provision an additional VM simply by publishing an html link and sending an email. It’s cheaper, faster, and more resilient than provisioning additional boxes in the datacenter, as you do with VDI.

The post also completely ignores some fundamental issues with VDI. For example, a defining characteristic of VDI is the pooling of resources in the datacenter, but the downside to pooling is that you are magnifying the risks and complexity of desktops—the classic “eggs in one basket” problem. With VDI, you are taking inherently resilient, distributed desktops and turning them into a highly concentrated system that is vulnerable to malfunction. With VDI, if the system goes down, all your desktops go down. A related problem is that IT has to over-provision in order to prepare for peak capacity (e.g., 9:00am on Monday morning). But it’s difficult to predict group behavior, and your “over-provisioning” may prove inadequate, anyway.

Finally, the post fails to address Madden’s own Offline Paradox. Offline capability is at the core of VDI’s shortcomings. There are many times when a user finds himself without an Internet connection, such as on a plane or when the connection goes down for whatever reason. With VDI, users without a connection are unable to access their virtual desktops. This is a key area where a client-based approach excels.

What do you think the future holds? Will virtual desktops live in the datacenter or on the host machine?

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

Back from BriForum 2010

Just got back from BriForum 2010, it was a great show as usual. This was the largest BriForum yet - both the attendee count and the exhibitor count were higher than ever. We had a table this year and got a lot of traffic. It was nice because most attendees were pretty knowledgeable about desktop virtualization and understood the benefits of client-side execution with central management, so we didn't need a lot of explaining for people to "get" the MokaFive solution. People loved our BareMetal demonstration and the fact you could manage both the BYOPC/work-from-home machines as well as BareMetal from the same management interface.

But without a doubt the best part of BriForum are the quality speakers and technical sessions. BriForum has a core of truly great presenters and speakers who talk technical and avoid FUD and marketing spin. People like Shawn Bass, Ruben Spruijt, Jeroen van de Kamp, Claudio Rodrigues, Steve Greenberg, Ron Oglesby, Tim Mangan, and Rick Dehlinger, just to name a few. And of course the man himself, Brian Madden. The presentations are great with a lot of technical meat behind them and mostly avoid the high-level fluffy marketing speak that you get at most other conferences. They are 75 minutes so you can actually get into some depth. The great presenters are what make BriForum a great event and I'm proud to have had the opportunity to present at the last two BriForums. The organizers also do a good job of treating the presenters well so I'm sure the trend will continue.

This year I did two sessions - one on BYOPC and another on Disk Workloads for Desktop VMs. The BYOPC one was in the first slot of the conference (8:45am!) and was completely full. There was a good mix of people, some of whom had deployed BYOPC, others who were interested in deploying it, and we had a good conversation. The key points were that BYOPC can reduce support costs and lead to happier users (if you do it right), and this change is happening whether you like it or not. Brian in his keynote had a great quote: "If you say there is no way you will allow it (BYOPC) in your organization, pretty soon you won't have to, because your employees will leave and go somewhere else." The other great quote I heard is: "If BYOPC is a competitive advantage today, it will be a requirement tomorrow."

The second one on Disk Workloads was much more technical. I did a deep dive into how I/O in a VM works and what a Desktop workload looks like. The desktop VM workload is quite different than server VM workloads - a typical server VM does 90% reads vs 10% writes, but a desktop is more like 60%/40% or even 50%/50%. Not only that, but the desktop VM workload is very latency-sensitive, and if you have any long latency writes, your user experience will suffer greatly. The load from a single desktop VM can peak at up to 8000 IOPS during certain operations. At the end of the session I did a demo that pitted a VM served from my Blackberry (15MB/sec read, 7MB/sec write, 10-30 IOPS) using MokaFive's optimized virtual disk format versus a normal VMDK on a much faster USB drive. The optimized one booted quickly and was very responsive, whereas the straight VMDK was sluggish, stuttering and unusable. It just goes to show that slow IO performance can make the user experience unbearable, and optimizations can make a big difference.

It was great to meet up again with the BriForum crowd and I'm looking forward to participating again next year!

John Whaley, CTO & Founder

Introducing MokaFive on BareMetal

We’re gearing up for BriForum this week, and for us, the highlight will be a sneak peak of an exciting new product that we have been working on: MokaFive BareMetal. Starting today, you can see for yourself what this solution is all about. Stop by our booth (#300) for the demo by MokaFive’s CTO, John Whaley.

The idea behind BareMetal is to provide a thin management layer that sits on the bare metal hardware. This is still in development so we don’t want to comment on the implementation details, but the benefits of BareMetal are clear: broad hardware support, extensive policy set, and the best management control in the industry.

If you’re familiar with MokaFive, you know we came out of the gate with support for VMware Player, and recently added another hypervisor to our arsenal – VirtualBox. Now, with MokaFive BareMetal, we’re going to eliminate the OS-middleman and enable users to run directly on the hardware itself.

So, why are we adding BareMetal? For one, it supports our commitment to be truly platform- and hypervisor- agnostic. Equally important, if not more, our customers have been asking for it. Those customers that are already running our Type-2 hypervisor based solution for their laptops and BYOC or employee owned devices are now looking to expand MokaFive management across all corporate desktops. With the BareMetal solution, customers will be able to use just a single Windows guest OS instead of licensing & paying for both the VM and the host OS. And the best part is that they can roll out the same virtual image, as well as policy controls, to both end users’ personal machines (using our Type-2 solution) as well as corporate-issued ones (using our BareMetal solution), with no additional management burden.

For the image, you can use the same image that you’re using for current deployments (BYOC). For installation of BareMetal, there will be a few different methods from which you can choose. Similar to other physical machines, you’ll be able to install it with installation ISOs, or over the network via a PXE server. I’m biased of course, but we have a solid solution here that dramatically simplifies management – of desktops and licenses – for customers.

If you’re at BriForum, be sure to come check out our BareMetal demo at booth #300. And while you’re there, Futurama fans should be sure to enter MokaFive’s drawing for a Bare Metal Bender.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

What is the right virtual desktop model for BYOC?

A recent blog post by Brian Madden compares the security differences between Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors. Brian writes that Type 1 bare-metal hypervisors are “possibly more secure due to the smaller attack surface of the hypervisor.” But he’s quick to point out that neither Type 1 nor Type 2 hypervisors are a one-size-fits-all solution.

After reading Brian’s blog, I thought about MokaFive’s approach to security. The problem with security is that you can’t talk in absolutes: the discussion depends on both the use case and its associated risk profile. If you are completely intolerant of risk, then you have to ignore the benefits of most Internet-based computing and keep your computer offline, locked up in a dark room. But in the real world, you have to support mobile and offline workers so they can be productive, and with that comes some risk. This is true of any computing model, but it’s important to mitigate that risk by choosing the best technology for your needs.

Let’s specifically look at the BYOC model where organizations want to enable computing on employee-owned machines. While there are many models to deliver specific applications from the cloud using technologies such as terminal services or even app streaming, these don’t provide the full usability of the entire desktop environment. So, what are the options for BYOC? There is VDI, but it provides no offline access and contrary to popular belief is not completely secure, either. While the VDI desktop lives in the datacenter, IT has no way to control the endpoint machine accessing the VDI session. Those endpoints could have keyloggers or screenscrapers that can siphon data from the VDI session.

In contrast, with the client-side models, a fully encapsulated VM is delivered to the endpoint, either directly on baremetal (with Type 1 hypervisor), or on top of an existing OS (with Type 2 hypervisor). There is almost unanimous agreement that a Type 1-based model will not work for BYOC, since no user will allow IT to forklift their personal machine. Only when Type 1s are shipped with OEM machines will this model will become viable for BYOC.

Net-net, a Type 2-based client-side model, where a fully managed, encapsulated VM is delivered on top of the user’s existing OS, is ideally suited for BYOC. It provides users access to the corporate environment anytime, online or offline, without impinging on their personal machine environment.

MokaFive supports a Type 2 model today while allowing you to grow to a Type 1 approach in the future. We leverage the MokaFive player residing on the client to provide additional protection against risks associated with BYOC. I have outlined below our approach with seven layers of security that protect against your concerns:

1. Host checker

• Checks for basic performance characteristics of the machine. It can also be extended to check for any other security characteristics of the host (such as configuration and execution status of anti-virus software) prior to the launch of the virtual desktop.

2. VM encapsulation

• Encapsulates a full, locked down OS controlled by IT. This allows IT to completely control the patch level and GPO security settings.

3. VM encryption

• Encrypts image with AES 256, including the base image and all user data. We also intercept all I/O that the hypervisor writes to disk or to memory, and this data is compressed and encrypted.

4. Tamper resistance of both code and policies, and copy protection

• Attempts to alter the executable or configuration will disallow the Player from running. Also, by policy, IT can disallow users from moving images from one machine to another.

5. AD authentication / Two-factor authentication (RSA or PKI)

• Integrates with Active Directory to enforce users’ authentication prior to virtual image access. Optionally, IT can configure RSA SecurID or PKI as a second authentication factor for additional security.

6. SSL

• Communicates with the server over SSL. Clients validate the server’s SSL certificates against a Certificate Authority.

7. Policies

• Enables administrators to have fine grained, centralized control of operational and security polices, such as peripheral access, and ability to drag and drop files from host to guest or vice versa.

Simply put, MokaFive is one of the few vendors that provides a secure, fully managed virtual desktop model for a BYOC model. Stay tuned: in an upcoming blog, we will talk about BYOC best practices.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

Going to BriForum 2010?

This year’s BriForum conference is coming up June 15 – 17 in Chicago, and we’ll be there with some exciting announcements and demos (hint: some new, really cool things straight from our lab).

Make sure you catch John Whaley, our CTO, who will present two sessions:

• “BYOPC: IT Panacea or Management Nightmare”(8:45 am on Tuesday, June 15). John will cover some of the pros, cons, and lessons learned from actual and attempted BYOPC deployments.

• “Understanding and Optimizing Disk Access Patterns for Desktop VM Workloads”(2:30 pm on Wednesday, June 16). This highly technical session will dive deep into what typical desktop VM disk access workloads look like and how to measure IO performance in a way that mirrors the users' perception.

Also, swing by our booth (#300) to see our demo. I’m really looking forward to meeting you all face-to-face. If you’d like to set up a meeting in advance, please contact Lynsey Rose at lrose@mokafive.com.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

Cloud and the Evolution of Client Computing

The headline of Mark Bowker’s article in Network World recently caught my attention: “Will Cloud Lead to the Failure of VDI?”

No equivocations on my part; the answer is a resounding yes. Today, there are multiple deployment models, but fast forward to three to five years from now, when cloud computing becomes much more mature, and we will see only two models survive. And neither will be VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure).

But let’s back up and look at what we have today.

First, there are thick client applications, such as Microsoft Office – rich applications locally executed on a desktop OS to give users a fast, seamless experience. This type of application is not going anywhere and will be around for a long time because it offers a high level of dynamic activity that cannot be rendered for a Web-only interface.

Over the last few years, a new class of applications has emerged that run in the cloud – for example Google apps or Salesforce.com. These apps are fundamentally built for the cloud and built to run on browsers from any computer or mobile device. These aren’t applications built to run locally which are just thrown into the cloud. Google is leading the charge here, with Google Chrome increasingly becoming an operating system itself. IN the near future, these apps will co-exist with thick client apps and end-users will require environments that support both models.

Somewhere in between is the third model today: VDI.

Though its proponents may say otherwise, VDI is not a true cloud-based solution. The apps were not built to run on the Web; they require rich local execution. What VDI does, in the simplest sense, is allow IT managers to put a rich local execution environment on a server and deploy it as a “cloud app,” albeit a crippled one at that. It offers none of the performance and offline use you get with a rich app nor the simplicity of a Web app. At best, VDI is a stopgap solution; it exists because most enterprise apps were not built for the Web.

In five years’ time when apps that need to run in the cloud are in fact purpose-built for the cloud, you can bet that VDI will become obsolete. In the end, we will have only two main types of applications: Rich, locally run applications for end use points and a rich set of applications built for cloud computing. Rich local execution apps will persist because computing will not be 100 percent online (yet) due to connectivity and performance. Some apps, such as PowerPoint (however much you love it or hate it), requires rich interaction, and therefore is best fit as a local, OS-based desktop application.

Interestingly, the motivation for VDI was always about central control. If VDI, as a management layer, is out of the picture, then how do you ‘control’ and centrally manage these two types of apps? We believe for rich endpoints client-side virtualization is the way to go – allowing central management of the desktop while enabling rich interactions and offline use. For the apps in the cloud – existing datacenter management tools solve the problem.

What do you think? What will a mature cloud computing environment mean for VDI?

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

To centralize, or not to centralize

You wouldn't do this with eggs. Why would you do it with your company's desktops?

Desktop virtualization holds great promise to dramatically reduce IT support costs, while allowing end users unprecedented access and flexibility. There are now dozens of offerings to choose from. But beware – your approach matters. A lot.

Picture the last time your PC crashed. Now imagine it happening to everyone in your company. All at the same time.

It makes complete sense to centralize certain aspects of desktop management. Access and policy control, reporting and image updating, definitely. And certain compute-intensive applications. But it makes little sense to centralize execution.

Desktop execution should (almost) always be decentralized.

A decentralized system is inherently more resilient than a centralized one. No single incident can bring down the productivity of the whole. This has been a truism in computer science, and it’s proven itself in many other systems, not least of which is the Internet itself. On the Internet, no single router or gateway failure can bring down the connectivity of all the endpoints. Instead, in the case of a failure, packets are rerouted around the downed node and transmissions successfully proceed.

Similarly in a decentralized desktop environment, a single PC failure, or even the failure of the management server itself, does not stop the productivity of the whole. Sure, a single user may be inconvenienced (and we all know that certain users are more important than others :) ), but there is no chance that the entire system can come down. When we say “no chance," we don’t actually mean “low probability,” or “five 9s,” etc. With decentralization, there is *no* chance of systemic failure. Nada.

Moreover, a decentralized desktop system is usually lower cost because consumer CPU and storage is much cheaper in aggregate than the equivalent resources in the datacenter. And decentralized execution provides the best user experience, since the user can be online or offline, does not have to worry about bandwidth, and local CPU provides better performance than a centralized remote one.

Now, certain narrow use cases do warrant centralization. But the vast majority of desktops should remain decentralized.

Something to chew on

Even with 14 years of experience and a bazillion dollars, Google’s search services went down last May. What’s the likelihood that your VDI will fare better?





Caveat VDI

Your existing physical desktop environment is already an inherently resilient system. Your company (and your career) can easily survive the occasional user hard drive crash or network issue. But now you’re thinking about scrapping that beautiful architecture, and replacing it at enormous upfront and ongoing costs with an inherently more fragile and risky one. There may be a legitimate cost-risk-benefit reason for you to do this – just be sure you’ve done the analysis.

A better way

Distributed Virtual Desktops (DVDs), a term coined by IDC, represent the low cost, highly flexible world of the New Desktop (capitalization intended). In this model, like your physical desktop solution, DVDs are controlled centrally, so access control, policies, reporting and image management happen efficiently by a single team. But desktops are virtualized so the same golden image can run on any platform, and any hardware configuration. This makes it better than your current physical desktop solution.

And, in stark contrast to VDI, DVDs execute in a decentralized fashion. This means that issues (and we all know issues can happen) are isolated to a single user. As with VDI, there are multiple offerings in the DVD space—MokaFive is one. At MokaFive, the tenet of decentralized execution has been imbued from the very beginning and throughout every aspect of our product design. We believe it’s the only way to go.

Burt Toma, Director of Products

Can a platform vendor be an effective management vendor?

Today we announced a preview of MokaFive’s new VirtualBox client for desktop management. With the addition of an open-source hypervisor, we are fulfilling our vision to be truly both OS-agnostic, as well as hypervisor-agnostic, giving our customers freedom of choice. This is only our first step, and we will continue to add support for more hypervisors, including broadening our current Linux-based baremetal to address Type-1.

This made me wonder: Can an OS or hypervisor platform vendor also be an effective management vendor? In other words, is it in the customer’s best interest to buy a management solution from the same company that supplies its operating system or its hypervisor? It seems to me that it’s impossible to meet your customers’ management needs when your company is tied to one platform. If you’re Microsoft, you’re going to sell a management solution that supports Windows. But what if, down the road, the customer wants to deploy a few Macs on the network? The customer will be out of luck because they are locked in to the Microsoft ecosystem.

As enterprises undergo transformation with more remote, mobile and contract workers, different platforms will have to be deployed or managed based on specific situations. IT needs to have a management solution that is not tied to one platform and is truly future proof. We’re already helping our customers to expand choice in operating systems and in hardware. Today we’re expanding choice in hypervisors. We’ve added our first free hypervisor for Macs—the open-source VirtualBox client—in addition to the VMware Fusion we have long used.

Choice has always been an important factor for our customers, who need the freedom to purchase the IT solutions best tailored for their business, regardless of which solutions they already have in place. It all needs to work together seamlessly. Increasingly, Macs are being used in the enterprise and, with the right tools, they can be managed easily alongside PCs. I believe this is where end-user computing is going, and as such, what IT needs to factor in for their decision-making.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products

The free Player is back! The free Player is back!

By popular demand, you can once again download a free MokaFive Player and use our sample LivePCs (Fearless Browser, among others). We took it down at the start of the year to make upgrades to our website as well as the Player. The all new free Player is aligned with our enterprise product and now supports Mac 10.6 and Windows 7. And yes, we are planning to expand the list of sample LivePCs – keep checking back. Enjoy!

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products

Learnings from our CIO Summit

Last month, we hosted our first quarterly CIO summit session that was attended by several CIOs representing some of the largest organizations in the US. The goal of this session was to investigate the priorities and the associated drivers for end-user computing within these large organizations. Over the course of a terrific power packed discussion, several themes emerged - one of which struck us as very distinctive.

We were expecting the usual themes around cost and control to emerge when, right at the beginning, one of the CIOs of a leading services firm said, “Look, it is not about control. IT doesn’t want to control; we just want to deliver enterprise value at the lowest possible cost, ensuring that every user is productive.” Quite a profound statement. Which brings us to the question, “Why are IT conversations always peppered with the word control?”

Upon further discussion, the answer became clear. The CIOs want to enable user productivity at the lowest cost and risk to the business. In the past, the only way to achieve a reliable, secure desktop was through lockdown and control. But over the years in many organizations, “control” has become the primary objective which, in turn, has lead to myopic decision making.

A number of influences seem to be changing this trend. One reason is that IT is required to support new business initiatives, which cannot be supported using traditional models. As the CIO for a large healthcare firm put it, “I have to enable new work models including teleworking and outsourcing. We hire talent where we get it and do not worry whether it is in the corporate location or not. These users need a secure, reliable working environment at their home, on the go, right at their fingertips at all times.” Second, there are finally a number of solutions now that can enable an IT organization to provide user flexibility without additional cost or risk penalty, so you don’t need to control and lockdown the user. In fact, client- based virtual desktop management solutions like MokaFive can significantly drive the cost and the risks down by enabling single image management across corporate and employee owned assets. (More elaboration in subsequent blog posts).

Another alternative that is commonly considered is VDI. Almost all the CIOs had investigated or were investigating VDI. But they found VDI to be too expensive, too complex, and most importantly, too restrictive for their users. This seems to be a growing sentiment and is reflected well in this article by Randy Eckel . We will explore more of the CIO comments and feedback in upcoming blogs.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

MokaFive, a green technology?

Yesterday we announced our new round of funding lead by NGEN Partners with contributions from existing investors Khosla Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, MokaFive Raises $21 Million in Venture Capital Funding. Over the past year, we have built a great enterprise-class product that is now deployed within large F1000 companies. With our product now proven in production, this funding allows us to rapidly scale our business and deploy new customers.

Why did a clean technology VC firm like NGEN Partners invest?

Like all successful venture capital firms, first and foremost they seek to invest in companies with a sound business model and huge market potential. Secondly, they look for opportunities to advance the mission and benefits of clean and green environments. You may ask yourself: how is a desktop management (virtualization) company like MokaFive “green”?

It’s very simple. Compared to VDI, or server-based computing, MokaFive's distributed virtual desktop solution offers a 90% reduction in number of servers needed –that is 90% less power, less space, less cooling and less bandwidth. In addition, the model provides *all* the benefits that accrue from a centralized management model. Also, the MokaFive model is a perfect solution to enable green initiatives, such as work from home. You can now simply provide employees with a secure, encapsulated virtual image that can run either on their machine at home or at work (bye-bye to worries about VPN on unknown, unsecured machines, access to terminals over low bandwidth, etc.). Telecommuting avoids not only the fuel used by commuters, but also the overhead energy costs needed to maintain a workplace.

Now, let’s talk about the market potential. End-user computing is being transformed by a huge variety of new devices and increasing numbers of mobile users. This change has marched right into the enterprises. As a result, managing computers with the necessary security and flexibility has become enormously expensive. MokaFive’s revolutionary approach allows you to cut traditional desktop management costs by as much as 50%. Our management solution enables you to maintain a single virtual image across any device and any user (e.g., employee, contractor, or teleworker). The virtual image is deployed to the endpoint so it eliminates the huge outlay in servers that VDI requires. The market potential to deliver a new, more effective model to update and maintain secure corporate environments across disparate, dispersed device and user types.

We are very excited to have NGEN on board, and we look forward to accelerating our business this year.

Purnima Padmanahban, VP of Products

Mac-Windows.com: "MokaFive virtual layers can rollback portions of VMs while retaining user data"

Want to know more about MokaFive's technology landscape? If so, check out the latest blog post on Mac-Windows.com—the web site for Mac-Windows integration—for more detail about virtual layers, policies, distribution, compression, and BlackBerries.

MokaFive "virtual layers" can rollback portions of VMs while retaining user data

With the layered desktop, MokaFive addresses the age old systems management problem by providing end user flexibility without compromising security. Enterprises can now reap the TCO benefits of true centralized standard image based management while enabling mass customization for their users. Unlike the classic monolithic desktop, the LivePC is separated into system, application, and user personality layers - that can be controlled and managed independently. Administrators can control and lockdown the corporate system and applications while enabling end users to customize their desktop with their own data and applications.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

Prediction Piece 2010: BYOPC for Today’s Workforce is a Reality

Is the only driver behind BYOPC attracting and retaining Gen-Y'ers?

Sure, the freshly minted college graduates who are entering your organization today were born in 1988. All they know is instant gratification of having information at their fingertips. As our CTO, John Whaley mentioned in a reply to Andi Mann's article, Is BYOPC Really Key to Attracting Millennials?, "a company that adopts a BYOPC program is more likely to attract millennials just by the fact they consider adopting such a program," not necessarily because it's just a perk to lure them in. Giving them the ability to bring in their hardware of choice, aka Mac, makes you look like the trend-setting, understanding employer (and then you put them to work, of course).

But is this attempt purely altruistic? We think there other drivers worth considering – namely, cost. There are deep cost advantages – some underneath the surface and worth the time to consider. By requiring employees to bring their own hardware, you get out of the hardware support business. Or if you're less inclined to give them complete choice, you have the option of corporate issued choice – you retain your volume discounts and offer a catalog of choices. Think about the flex initiatives that are growing in popularity, where companies are aiming to lower overhead by keeping workers in the office for fewer hours during the week, or fewer days. Now think of BYOPC as synonymous with use of home computers – which is more "use your own" rather than "bring your own." Here, real estate costs can be eliminated, which can represent a large percentage of the operating budget.

A client based managed VM can not only address the above scenarios in a very cost effective way, it can also eliminate the security risk associated with allowing corporate access from unmanaged, unknown endpoints. Cost effective – because it 1) Negates the need to deploy vast amounts of server infrastructure that server hosted virtual desktop solutions require; 2) Allows your users to leverage the distributed assets on hand such as personal PCs 3) Enables you to support new green initiatives such "work from home" and productivity initiative such as "Platform Choice". Secure – because it 1) Eliminates the worry of VPN clients tunneling into the perfect lockdown corporate world from dirty machines since the VPN session can now be established only from within the secure lockdown VM; 2) Removes the need to subject a user to time consuming extensive host AV scanning/could quarantining process.

If BYOPC has not looked that promising before – then it is time to look at it again. This time not just for Gen Y’ers but also for the cost saving that it can deliver to you.

MokaFive solves these exact problems while realizing the cost benefits of eliminating hardware costs, real estate costs, backend infrastructure costs, and excessive overhead. MokaFive's virtual desktop is an isolated virtual machine that sits on the endpoint – yet is fully managed, tied to a server behind the enterprise firewall that filters down policies and settings for the virtual desktop to completely lock it down and ensure safe access to the network. Whether corporate-issued choice (Mac or PC), true BYOPC or work-from-home, the cost savings are clear.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing