MokaFive

The iPad is Great, but Virtualizing the MacBook Air is about Pure Productivity Bliss

2011-02-24T09:30:00.000-08:00

I had the chance to make the short trip up to San Francisco last week for the RSA Conference. I had some terrific meetings lined up, and also had some downtime scheduled in between a few of them. Being the “exemplary” 21st century executive that I always strive to be, I figured I could catch up on email, edit a number of documents and otherwise stay connected to help keep the fires burning back at the office during my breaks.

A funny thing happened as I was packing my work bag for the first day of the show. While I’ve been glued to my iPad as the “don’t leave home without it” device for the past year, I suddenly felt the urge to leave it behind this time around. Maybe it was having the foresight of the type of work I needed to tackle that day. After all, it certainly required some heavy lifting. Regardless, I felt myself grabbing for my shiny new MacBook Air, thinking to myself, this really is the one and only device I need to get the job done right today.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPad and it has certainly been a great companion device for keeping up on email, reading books and even keeping my child entertained while we’re on the road. The very notion of the iPad is certainly an intriguing one with its brilliant touch screen and countless apps, and I know many would say it works just fine as a productivity device. However, I think at this point I beg to differ and my experience at RSA helped to cement my thinking.
When it comes to getting the important tasks done, I want my keyboard, my processing power and a nice screen. I also want seamless access to my work environment whether online or offline, and the iPad has never been great from that standpoint. That said, I do still want it all on a single device that also contains my itunes and photos.

So what’s the point? The MacBook Air is about the same size as the iPad. It fit right into my work bag and provides the same functionality, plus a whole lot more (there’s something comforting about still having access to Safari and iTunes when the work is done). It’s just as cool, sleek and sophisticated – and it’s a tremendous device for leveraging all the benefits desktop virtualization has to offer. I used MokaFive to work on my corporate desktop at RSA (without worrying about getting the wireless password at each cafe), and I was about as productive at the conference as I am back at the office, barring a few waiters and old friends popping in to help to break my stride on occasion. They were all welcomed interruptions, of course.

We’ve heard so much about enabling the iPad in the workplace recently, but why struggle to support it when the notion of providing employees with a MacBook Air and virtualizing the corporate desktop on such a killer device is one that can and should easily win the day? From my vantage point, we can leave the touch screen and apps for the family outings, and instead consider making the move to what I think just might be the device of our day for creating a happier, more productive workforce.

Bottom line – if you have Apple-hungry employees, lighten the load and try putting a MacBook Air in their hands and virtualizing their corporate desktop, and I think you’ll quickly see what I mean.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

RSA Conference 2011: BYOC and Security

2011-02-16T16:06:00.000-08:00

I presented a session on BYOC and Security at RSA Conference 2011 today. Judging from the turnout (the room was packed), there is a lot of interest in this topic right now as companies are struggling with how to deal with employee-owned devices. When I asked how many people worked at companies that have official BYO programs, only a few people raised their hands. But when I asked how many people use a personal device for work, almost everyone's hand shot up. Too many IT departments either try to restrict access from personal devices, in which case employees work around the restrictions so they can get their work done, or the IT departments put their blinders on and pretend the problem doesn't exist. They would be much better off to actually embrace BYO and make it easy for users to "do the right thing".

Companies stand to save a lot by adopting BYOC programs because they can get out of the business of owning and managing people's desktops and laptops. Support costs are actually lower with BYOC than with corporate-owned devices. Not only that, but BYO actually leads to happier and more productive users. One of our law firm customers had their employee satisfaction national ranking jump from 95th place to 16th place in one year, and the only change they made was to deploy MokaFive and allow their employees to choose Macs. Employees who participate in BYO programs also work longer hours, are more likely to work from home and in the evenings, and are less likely to lose or break their laptop.

Once companies realize their employees are already using their own devices anyway, and it is not that difficult to provide the corporate environment in a managed VM in a secure way while still letting employees and contractors use their own machines, they will start adopting official BYOC programs. Don't get me wrong - there are lot of challenges to setting up a successful BYOC program. But the organizations that embrace this change rather than resist or ignore it will be better off, with lower costs and happier, more productive employees.

Update: The slides for my RSA 2011 BYOC talk are now available online.

Desktop Virtualization Savings: It's in the Approach

2011-01-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

One of the things we keep hearing from prospects about desktop virtualization is cost. In fact, in a meeting with our CIO Council this spring, the CIO of a major Wall Street bank said this firm’s investments in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution had so ballooned out of proportion and the experience had been so painful that it’s left permanent bad taste in everyone’s mouth. There’s no way, he contends, that he could ever sell “desktop virtualization” to his firm again – management and end users alike.

That point really inspired us to work on a TCO model – so companies know what the costs entail before they commit to a desktop management path. Fundamentally, desktop virtualization is about easier desktop management and cost savings the icing on the cake.

In our TCO calculations, we show how MokaFive can dramatically cut desktop TCO by at least 45% by delivering savings in three areas:

1. Operational costs;
2. Helpdesk costs; and
3. Capital costs.

Operational Savings. MokaFive’s management model -- central management and distributed execution – is unique in the market, and critical to lowering overall TCO. The IT administrator creates one golden image, called the LivePC, which is sent down to thousands of users. To patch or update OS or applications, IT updates the single golden image in a central location, and automatically the changes are distributed to users’ machines. Contrast that to traditional software distribution, which requires every endpoint to be individually patched which can result in errors, complications and costs. (It’s no wonder companies are dreading the Windows 7 migration – and I am not at all surprised by the costs.)

Helpdesk Savings. MokaFive also delivers savings in helpdesk costs. Typically the most expensive calls occur when a user corrupts their machine with a virus. With MokaFive’s rejuvenate capability, a corrupted desktop can be “rejuvenated” back to its pristine state with all personal data intact – all with just a click of a button. The user doesn’t have to even make a helpdesk call or be online. The CIO of one of our earliest customers – a major law firm in Silicon Valley – recently raved to me about the unexpected savings in their helpdesk costs. They hadn’t even calculated it into their models (nor we, for that matter), but we now expect them to have paid for their initial investment in the next year.

If not for MokaFive, this customer’s helpdesk would be fielding level two and level three calls when a user corrupts their machine with a virus. This specific case calls for a desktop re-image, which can be a very cumbersome process taking hours, if not days to complete. When you re-image the machine, IT needs to supply a new OS, restore all the applications, and then re-apply all the user data.

We estimate steady state this is going to be true whether it’s a VDI instance or with software distribution because even in a VDI scenario the user has to make a helpdesk call and the administrator has engage and to revoke the VM and put the data back on.

Capital Savings. With MokaFive, enterprises have the option to implement BYOC (bring your own computer) programs for employees and contractors. Cisco and Dell made headlines last year when they initiated BYOC programs giving their employees a stipend to purchase their own computer. Both used virtualization to deliver company approved applications, but their approaches had significant limitations. In Dell's case, the only real choices was, well, Dell machines. Cisco at least allowed more latitude, so employees could purchase Macs, but "they are pretty much on their own for tech support." With these traditional desktop management models, and even with VDI, BYOC hits a snag due to online-offline access issues.

With MokaFive, IT deploys and manages the virtualized corporate environment on employee-chosen machines (Mac or a PC, online or offline) using MokaFive and benefit from the central management and distributed model I discussed above.

Going Green. There is one final area of savings I'd like to highlight -- though it may not necessarily be considered by CIOs when making a decision on desktop virtualization: the environmental impact. With MokaFive's approach, companies can use existing equipment; existing personal devices and existing corporate devices. In the case of contractors, companies are no longer buying assets, nor are they provisioning servers to the datacenter. All these add up to a reduction in new power-hungry equipment. MokaFive’s approach give you almost status-quo type of energy in the case of most work from home and contractor scenarios – and is even more effective than what we have today. I go into a lot more detail on this in an earlier post.

For our customers, the savings in all these areas have been very real. But the fact remains that desktop virtualization has over-promised and under-delivered for many years -- to the detriment of all of us. Just because two (with a third making very fast progress) very large vendors dominate virtualization, it doesn't mean innovation has ceased. It's still happening, and MokaFive is proof of it, 20+ patents and still coming.

We've really put a lot of thought into all the costs associated with managing desktops. Our customers have weighed in and helped us create a TCO model that factors in these four areas. We invite you to sign up for a personalized TCO for your environment.

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing

Windows 7 Migration Just Got Easier with MokaFive Suite 3.0

2010-12-08T06:40:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-11-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-03T17:14:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-02T17:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-19T08:09:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-07-13T13:03:00.001-07:00

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

2010-06-24T15:47:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-18T13:53:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-06-09T10:20:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-05-25T14:42:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-06T12:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-05T15:50:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-04-29T02:54:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-04-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-13T09:11:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-04-02T09:18:00.000-07:00

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"

2010-03-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

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

Virtual Layers: A Retrospective

2009-11-18T17:13:00.000-08:00

After we introduced our Layering solution as part of our 2.0 product in June, a lot of people have been talking about Virtual Layers. (Check out Gabe Knuth's "What is Layering, and why does it matter?" post for a good overview.) Now the feature has been in customer's hands for a few months, I have a better perspective about what works well with layered management (and what doesn't work), and why.

Reaction to Layering

The key realization behind layering is that different people are responsible for different parts of the desktop, and you want to manage the pieces independently. Layering provides a very easy way to combine different managed pieces into a single cohesive environment.

The reaction after we released layering was very positive. Everyone I've talked to loves the story and wants to move to a world where they can manage their desktop using layers. Since we released our product in June, a number of other companies have started talking about layering and management using layers. Some have even announced products in this space. However, MokaFive is still, five months later, the only layering solution that is commercially available. On the customer front, layering has generated a huge amount of interest in MokaFive and is one of our key differentiators.

While we've had great success with customers using layering, some people are skeptical about whether layered management can actually work in their real-world environment. They've heard claims like this before with other technologies and have been disappointed.

Layering and Application Virtualization

The desire to manage independent pieces is not new, and there have been products that have tried to solve this problem for a very long time. Application virtualization is one such technique. Application virtualization allows you to wrap up an application and all its dependencies into a single bundle that can be easily managed. At least, that's the promise.

Most of our customers and prospects have played with application virtualization, and some are deploying it today for some of their applications. But everyone who has used application virtualization in real scenarios is aware of its limitations.

First, you as the admin need to sequence the applications, which is easy to do wrong and very, very, very hard to do right. You need expert knowledge in the internal application structure, as well as expert knowledge of Windows and of the ins-and-outs of the particular application packaging. Sequencing is a black art and it takes a long time to learn how to do it well.

The second problem with application virtualization is it is a really, really hard problem to solve, so no one has solved it completely. To completely virtualize an application, you need to correctly emulate every operating system component that the application interacts with. This is an exceeding difficult problem especially when the OS changes, and applications rely on undocumented behavior and bugs. A perfectly compatible application virtualization solution would require a reimplementation of most OS components. (Once you do that, you don't even need Windows anymore. For those who are familiar with WINE on Linux, WINE is application virtualization. It works with many applications but has some serious restrictions.) In fact, in the best case for the very best application virtualization products, the compatibility rate is only 90%. That leaves 10% of applications that cannot be virtualized.

The third issue with using application virtualization is that it provides isolation, which is not always what you want. When you package an application, it becomes independent of the rest of the system, so you can run it in a wider variety of environments. However, that also limits interaction with the rest of the system. When you try to paste your Visio diagram into your Word document and those applications are separately virtualized, it doesn't work because the applications are isolated. You have to do a bunch of work to explicitly open conduits between the virtualized applications, and you have to do this for all applications. This goes against the whole point of having a single cohesive environment where everything can interact.

The reason I bring up application virtualization is because its limitations are fairly well-understood, people assume layering is the same way. But the way we did layering avoids these problems.

Why Does Layering Work?

One of the key differences for our layering solution is that in our system, a layer is tied to a particular base image. That means that we don't need to solve the problem of trying to get the same layer to work on all environments, we just need to make it work in the one base image it was installed in, plus any delta updates to that base image. This means we don't need to know dependencies between applications to bundle them up or verify they exist, we don't need to normalize paths or registry keys to work on different base OS configurations, we don't need to worry about compatibility between different base images. So we avoid a huge set of problems.

Layering is trying to solve a different problem than traditional application virtualization. Application virtualization is about isolating applications so they can be delivered easily and will run the same way in different environments. Layering is in many ways the opposite of isolation - it is about combining pieces to form a single cohesive whole, while maintaining the ability to manage each layer individually.

What about delta updates? Couldn't that break layering because the base image changes? Theoretically yes, but we have not run into this problem in customer deployments. The reason is most updates do not need to make modifications to higher layers. This makes intuitive sense - installing a hotfix or service pack usually doesn't search your hard drive for other programs and files and make modifications to them. Programs which do variations of this (e.g. upgrading to a new version converts the data files to a new format) require some special consideration when using them in a layered management environment.

The other issue that can arise during layering is when the layers have conflicting updates. Say you have applications that both the user and administrator can update. When they install conflicting versions, whose version wins? The layering engine is flexible enough to allow you to specify this at a fine-grained level, but it can lead to a confusing user experience as some user changes will persist while others will not. The solution is to be structured in terms of who is responsible for what. For example, the administrator controls a core set of applications, operating system files, and VPN, while the user can keep their own personalizations and applications but cannot change the components controlled by the administrator. With some planning, you can avoid conflicts between the layers. We provide some best practices for our customers that have worked well in avoiding conflicts.

There are two basic properties that ensure layered management works correctly. The first is that changing lower layers should not require changes to the data on higher layers. If they do, then we may need to account for dependencies. The second is you need to specify a policy when there are conflicting updates between layers, and some care has to be taken in how to specify that policy so that it operates in an intuitive way while still gaining the benefits of updates and rejuvenation. We have a set of recommended layering configurations that avoid the problems while maximizing the benefits, and our customers have been using them with great success so far.

Looking Forward

Layering has been a big success for MokaFive and continues to be one of our key technology differentiators. We designed the layering solution with specific goals in mind, so we avoided most of the downsides of other approaches. Now we've been through actual customer deployments, we have a good idea on how to most effectively use layering for management.

We are continuing to push ahead on layering, using our experience with deployments to improve the product and working on some great new features that take advantage of the layering engine. There are some exciting new features we are beta-testing today for release next year that are going to raise the stakes on layering. Stay tuned!

John Whaley, CTO & Founder

Deploying XenApp Within a Virtual Desktop: The Why's & How's

2009-10-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

We posted recently about the possibilities of creating a flexible, yet secure virtual desktop - with the right management tools. If you're familiar with the benefits of virtualization and have already invested in application virtualization technology, now you can go a step further to get security and centralized management of the entire desktop image. Deploying a well-managed virtual desktop will secure your user's operating system and simplify management of the entire environment, without sacrificing the ability to let users customize, run offline or on the go. The secret with virtual desktops is to "manage centrally, execute locally."

Deploying a flexible virtual desktop management solution is a relatively quick and simple process (a few hours to set things up), but can save IT administrators an impressive 60% on desktop support and management costs. Support costs drop as users can simply restart their virtual desktop to "rejuvenate" the original clean-state image with all of its applications and settings, wiping away any malware picked up along the way.

For instance - if you're already using XenApp, here are the basic steps:

1) Make sure your XenApp Server is configured to talk to your Domain Controller - this is important because you will be targeting apps based on users

2) Use MokaFive’s Creator to build a base LivePC image

3) Now that you have created a base image, you can install other applications, including XenApp applications, on top of it

4) From MokaFive's management console, target this LivePC to any users you choose to receive it

5) In the XenApp Access Management Console, set a number of policies for how you want XenApp to launch and run (from the server, locally, online/offline, etc.).

For step-by-step instructions, check out this document.

MokaFiveTV is Live

2009-09-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

Curious to know more about desktop virtualization? The concept of managing virtual desktops with layers? Want to learn the backstory on how MokaFive came to be?

To satisfy your curiousity and learn about innovations in desktop computing, we invite you to check out the MokaFiveTV channel on YouTube. Our co-founder and CTO John Whaley, along with co-founder and current Stanford CS professor Monica Lam as well as other experts from the team will give you an inside look at what it's all about.

For starters, you'll find the following video episodes:
MokaFive: A brief background
Virtual Layers - Inside View
At the Whiteboard - Layering
Virtual Layers - Application Management

For an even more intimate view, follow "Joe Whaley" and MokaFive on Twitter.

Building a Flexible (yet secure) Desktop Solution

2009-08-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

Many of you are already familiar with server virtualization and VDI and you might be looking for a virtualization approach that will help more easily secure and control desktop environments in a wider range of environments, i.e. bring-your-own-laptop, offline access, remote employees, etc.

In this post, I am going to describe one way to build a desktop environment which provides a lot of flexibility to users but still lets IT maintain control.

Consider an alternative approach to VDI: instead of running the VM image on a centralized server, the VM is running locally on the end-user's machine. The mantra is: "Manage centrally, execute remotely." This new model provides a great platform for IT organizations to customize solutions to fit their needs.

First, let's look at application virtualization and how that might fit in. Some of you maybe familiar with it - the big names in this space are: Microsoft AppV (formerly SoftGrid), VMware ThinApp (formerly Thinstall), and Citrix XenApp. In this model, an application is packaged up in a bundle and the user runs the application from this bundle in a sandbox environment on their unmanaged desktop. This is a great solution for delivering single applications to users because the application does not need to be installed manually on the local machine and it is delivered on-demand to the user. IT does not get involved in managing the OS and data on the machine.

However, not managing the OS or the rest of the desktop makes the computing environment vulnerable. In most cases, it's imperative to properly manage the environment to make sure the computer doesn't crash due to a missing security patch or that business data is not left unsecured. This is one of the reasons the desktop virtualization approach "manage centrally, execute locally" really shines - by easily securing the environment around a virtualized application:

Let's use the below image to explore the MokaFive layer approach to managing a virtual desktop, from bottom to top:

On the lowest layer, there is the host PC or Mac operating system. The Mokafive Player, to download and run the virtual "LivePC" desktop, can be run on either platform, so you don't need to worry about cross-platform support in your solution. We take care of that.
The layers above the host platform is the MokaFive Player and the Hypervisor. This allows you to manage the next layers above and control various security settings. IT can control what the user can or cannot do in the virtual desktop by setting policies on the central, Web-based management console.
Then there is the base OS that runs inside the virtual machine (Windows XP or Vista).
You can also install any corporate applications, i.e. Outlook, Word, a CRM or ERP application, etc. Together with the base OS, this can be your standard base virtual desktop image for your company or one base image for a specific department. By default, the base image is locked down by the MokaFive Player so it can't be tampered with.
The top layer is where the magic happens. You can deploy additional applications to your users, based on their needs, using application virtualization technology. You can have users run applications from the server or you can have the applications streamed down to the virtual desktop, depending on performance needs. If you have an existing virtualized application installation, the MokaFive solution fits right now.
Also on the top layer is the user installed applications. Using the personalization feature that is built into the MokaFive 2.0 technology, you can allow users to install their own applications on top of your standard managed image. You give your users flexibility to do whatever they want on the top layer while you maintain control on the lower layers.

We have tried this configuration with XenApp, AppV and ThinApp. I think this configuration provides the most flexibility to both IT and end users while at the same time, IT still maintains control.

Back from Briforum

2009-07-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

Back from last week’s Briforum conference in Chicago, and I must say it was an enriching experience. How many people can say they rode to dinner in a stretch Hummer with 30 other geeks?

The amazing thing about Briforum was the content-rich discussions. Unlike other shows I’ve been to, Briforum was a super concentration of the leading practitioners and researchers in the virtual desktop space. Moreover, there was a candid, open sharing of ideas -- and a sense that no one has this figured out, so let’s all push it ahead together. Very refreshing.

In particular, I really enjoyed Ruben Spruijt (Twitter, blog) and Shawn Bass’ (Twitter, blog) overview on application and desktop delivery solutions. Impressively, in 75 minutes, it covered the full expanse of virtual desktops and applications. I left with a much better sense of the “lay of the land”.

For MokaFive’s part, John Whaley (Twitter) and I held a session on the huge promise of layering in virtual desktops, and it’s ability to greatly improve manageability of VMs for IT on the one hand and the customizability of VMs for users on the other. We had a terrific turnout and many great questions from the audience, even though we started at 5:30pm and lasted way into the dinner hour. A testament to dedication and fortitude of Briforum attendees!

Update: John just posted a short video demo where he gives an inside view of our layering technology. This is a "short and sweet" clip of what we showed during Briforum.

For more photos of BriForum, check out Brian Madden's Flickr stream and the fan section of MokaFive's page on Facebook.

Burt Toma

Tachibana teams up with MokaFive in Japan

2009-07-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

Today we announced Tachibana Eletech Co. Ltd as a MokaFive distributor in Japan. With nearly 90 years under its belt, Tachibana is one of the most respected and well-established Japanese technology firms and will be a solid partner to bring MokaFive solutions to market.

Security and cost are two of the most important factors influencing the deal, according to Masao Hamamura, operating officer, Information & Communication Systems at Tachibana. His statement for our press release today was, "Security is a top concern for our enterprise clients, and MokaFive provides the best solution to secure desktop environments in a wide variety of secure remote computing scenarios. Another major factor that makes MokaFive Suite platform superior to competitive products is that it does not require our customers to invest in new hardware."

This is MokaFive's first major international channel partner announcement and with MokaFive Suite available as an easy-to-install platform, building out the channel network will be a primary focus for us. In addition to consulting, reselling, and developing systems using MokaFive, Tachibana will also use MokaFive technology to develop new products to extend its thin-client business unit, TC Cube.

USB drive testing at MokaFive

2009-07-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

The USB flash memory drive market has been changing very fast. A few years ago, a couple hundred dollars would get you a slow 4G drive. Now, the same capacity costs less than $20. However, not all drives perform the same and we have tested a lot of them at MokaFive.

We test USB drives for performance and reliability and have found that more expensive drives do not necessarily mean they are faster or more reliable. Although USB drives look simple, there is a lot of science behind building a good drive and it's not easy for the average consumer to get product specs without digging through reviews or actually running tests firsthand. We found that drives from same vendor may perform differently since performance depends on the flash memory and the USB controller that the drives use. Our CTO, John Whaley, discussed the nuances of USB drive performance with Robert Scheier from Computerworld last summer. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:

The single biggest factor in USB drive performance is whether it contains one of two types of memory: SLC (single-level cell) or MLC (multilevel cell). SLC stores one bit, and MLC stores two bits of data in each memory cell. SLC is twice as fast as MLC, says [Pat] Wilkison [vice president of marketing and business development at STEC Inc.], with maximum read speeds of about 14 MB/sec. and write speeds of about 10-12MB/sec. Not surprisingly, almost all current USB flash drives are built using MLC memory, since SLC costs about twice as much as MLC.

Users would see the greatest performance difference between SLC and MLC if they were performing many operations involving small files, rather than relatively few read/write operations on larger files, says John Whaley, principal engineer at MokaFive Inc., whose virtualization software makes it possible for virtual machines to be stored on USB flash drives.

Beside basic manual testing and normal day-to-day use, we also set up automated tests to run on these drives. We test our client software on them and we also run various performance benchmarks. We want to make sure they perform well when our customers run their virtual desktop off the drives. We also test for reliability by plugging and unplugging the drives continuously.

Here is a photo of a device we put together to automate testing.

In addition to the standard benchmarks of MB written and read per second, we have some custom tools which more accurately measure how a drive will perform when running Mokafive LivePCs. These tests give us two “scores,” one of which correlates to speed, and one which correlates to responsiveness. Read and write operations to a drive can have varying delays. We’ve found that measuring how many of these delays take more than 100 ms gives us a good idea of how responsive the drive will feel when running a LivePC. We’ve found that sometimes even drives with higher overall read and write speeds will have more delays, and that when running a LivePC, that drive will feel more sluggish to the user than a drive with fewer delayed operations.

At Mokafive we’ve also developed some technology to make running LivePCs on USB drives faster, more robust, more user-friendly, and more secure. We also run our tests on this software to measure the improvements that we’re able to make. As an example, a particular drive got a “speed” score of 8.2 and a “responsiveness” score of 6.7. When running our USB drive acceleration software, the same drive got a “speed” score of 9.4 and a “responsiveness” score of 8.6.

A couple of years ago, we even custom made our own drives, so we could control the quality of the drives.

The following table shows some of the results from our latest round of testing:

USB drives	MaxWrite (higher is better)	MaxRead (higher is better)	MokaFive rating(higher is better)
OCZ Throttle	22506	35035	9.4
Patriot Xporter XT	5798	30393	6.8
SuperTalent 16GB	7821	18104	6.2

We have more results available upon request. And if you are planning to deploy your virtual desktop using USB drives and need some recommendations, please feel free to contact us. I am sure our experience in USB flash memory drives will save you a lot of time and money.

The Basics of Image Management: Targeting & Policy Control of Virtual Desktops

2009-07-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

In the world of server virtualization, one of the challenges is to manage all those virtual machine images. An enterprise may have a couple hundred servers but they may have a couple THOUSAND virtual machine images to manage. The reason for having so many images is that IT needs to support different OSes, different software stacks and different applications, etc. There are image management tools for server virtualization that sell for thousands of dollars just to keep track of the images.

If an enterprise is going to virtualize their desktops, the images management may become an even bigger problem. Is IT going to set up one VM image per user? Probably not. But what if different users need different applications or different access control policies? Is IT going to set up one VM image per difference? Maybe. But should they?

There is a better approach - achieved through two management concepts related to targeting and policy control.

The idea behind targeting is to allow an IT admin to "target" a particular version of an image to a particular group of users along with a unique set of access control policies. For example, Group A will use Image X and their policies are set so that they cannot paste copied data outside of the VM.

For the same Image X, IT can target it to Group B with a different set of policies. Targeting makes this possible with just a few clicks in the management software and doesn't require the creation or cloning of any images.

Different group of users can also be targeted with different version of the same image. This is great for quickly and easily testing changes to an image without a lot of fuss. For example, if the IT admin adds an application to an image but wants only a few people to test it before it is released to everyone, he or she can target the update version to a smaller group while everyone else stays in the current version.

Once everything is tested, the admin can switch the update version to become the release version and everyone would automatically get the update. It's important that only the changes to the image be sent out to users, so that users don't have to download the entire image again. When just the differential is sent the image can be updated in the background without disrupting the user at all, saving a lot of time and bandwidth.

Another way to simplify image management is to make sure that when IT updates an image, all the access policy settings remain unchanged, avoiding major headaches and time sinks. For instance, if IT has one Image X targeted to Group A with Policy 1 and the same Image X is targeted to Group B with Policy 2. When IT releases an update to the image, both groups will get the update while keeping their respective policy settings.

Of course, MokaFive's 2.0 technology and the MokaFive Suite incorporates the sophisticated image management functionality of targeting and persistant policy settings.

Here is a video that demonstrate these management features. Take a look and let us know if you have any feedback.

v2.2 is available!

2009-07-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

You may be wondering why we are releasing 2.2 so quickly. Didn't we just announce 2.0?

Good question. The truth is, v2.0 has been available to our existing v1.7 customers for over a month. They have been using it and giving us a lot of valuable feedback. Last week, we announced v2.0 publicly along with a new Website. Now anyone can purchase the MokaFive Suite v2.0.

Today, we released v2.2. It includes a few bug fixes plus the following new features:

RSA SecureID support
Co-branding support
Using Amazon S3 as the Primary Image Store

If you haven't checked out our v2.x product yet, please contact us to schedule a demo or a trial.

The nitty gritty: Brian Madden notes MokaFive has the first "real" layering product

2009-07-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

Brian Madden has just written up an article on our 2.0 product titled "The first “real” layering product? MokaFive’s new v2.0 looks pretty good!" and I would like to follow up on it by providing a few additional details.
As Brian mentions in his article, our technology separates the system state, application state, user installed applications, user data and preferences transparently. To the end users, when they use a Windows XP LivePC, they will just use it the same way as they are using their Windows laptop.

An important point is that we allow the IT administrator to customize and control the policies. An IT admin can enable or disable user installed applications from the centralized console and also edit the layering policy file and determine what the system should or should not preserve. For example, IT can choose to only approve use of MSN instant messenger but not Yahoo IM. He can edit the layering policy file to only preserve all the settings and files related to MSN IM. If the user downloads and installs Yahoo IM on the corporate LivePC, it will be wiped clean when the user reboots the LivePC.

There is a misconception that layering is easy. When scrutinized, it is clear that it's quite a complex proposition. Our first implementation three years ago was similar to other offerings today. Originally we used junction point to separate the Windows "Documents and Settings" folder to a separate disk and then preserved that disk. However, we learned that does not work for all applications and system preferences. Some times applications or the system needs to put data in locations other than the user folder. That's why we spent time developing this advanced system for dealing with sophisticated requirements for the broad variety of applications a user could choose to install.

The layering technology is cool but what makes it very powerful is the flexibility it provides to the IT admin to customize for your organization's needs. In the upcoming weeks, we will be writing more articles on how to configure and deploy Windows XP LivePC using this new feature.

User Personalization: The New Frontier in Desktop Virtualization

2009-06-24T14:47:00.000-07:00

When companies give laptops to their employees, they set various access policies. Some companies let their employees do what they want on these laptops, like install software, while other companies lock down their laptops so employees can only do work related items. I know people who have to carry two laptops, one corporate and one personal, while they travel so they can do personal things on the road.

When companies set these policies, they are forced to make a trade off between employee productivity and flexibility with data security and manageability. The more flexible IT is towards the user, the harder it is to manage the laptops. How much time does IT really want to spend on re-imaging laptops because users frequently mess them up? At the same time, users are working longer hours from remote locations, so IT needs to make sure the users are happy and productive. And if something goes wrong, users do not want to have to wait days before they can try out software that might help their work.

Now companies are planning to implement desktop virtualization, especially VDI, to reduce their cost in supporting laptops and desktops. However, they have not realized that they are just avoiding one problem by introducing another. Instead of managing physical machines, they will be managing a lot more virtual machine images.

When the MokaFive founding team was at Stanford looking at desktop virtualization trends, we realized that we needed to make sure the solution satisfied both the needs of the IT department as well as the needs of the end users. If the solution only makes one side happy, it will never be successful.

This is why we introduced a product called User Personalization in our new version 2.0. A new policy is added which allows IT to control whether an end user can or cannot personalize or customize the virtual machine image. If IT allows the user to change various Windows settings, install applications etc., on the image, IT controls the image - IT can update it, add new applications, etc. The changes in the base image and the customization done by the user are merged when the user boots up the image. If the user messes up, he just needs to revert all of his changes and go back to the base image. IT does not need to be involved at all.

By combining the User Personalization feature with the Targeting feature, we are providing a very powerful image management solution for desktop virtualization deployment. With v2.0, you can have one single Windows XP image targeted to different groups with different policies. And you can give a group more flexibility and another less. You can work on the next image release while everyone stays productive. When the release is ready, a few clicks in the management console and you get everyone updated.

MokaFive 2.0 now available!

2009-06-24T13:17:00.000-07:00

It's is a big week for the team here at MokaFive. As many of you know, MokaFive started as a project at Stanford to use virtual machines to make it easier to manage desktops. A little over a year ago we released our 1.0 product, which was a hosted solution. We got a lot of positive feedback from customers about our 1.0 product, but the number one customer request was to provide the capability to run the MokaFive service in-house.

So this week, we announced 2.0! The 2.0 technology comes in the form of an enterprise-ready Desktop-as-a-Solution platform: MokaFive Suite. With 2.0, you can install and run MokaFive Suite in your data center, behind your firewall, and serve your end-point clients without depending on us. You can integrate with all your existing management solutions. You are in total control.

Enterprise computing is reaching a turning point right now as desktop virtualization technologies mature - answering business challenges that haven't been solved before. Our customers are innovating with the quick to deploy MokaFive Suite, taking advantage of mass user-customization, policy-based security. We will share detail of how different businesses (across healthcare, legal, finance, other professional service companies) are solving their challenges - and the benefits they have achieved.

We have also added some exciting new capabilities on the client side. For a long time, we have been working behind the scenes on a new layering technology that dramatically changes the way you can deploy and manage virtual desktops. This technology allows you to separate the machine into layers that can be independently managed and updated. Among other things, you can now allow users to install their own applications, while you can still manage and update a single golden image. That's right, your users can install any applications (even kernel drivers) and they will persist across rejuvenation and updates, as long as you set the policy to allow them to do so. This is a major breakthrough and one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of desktop virtualization, and MokaFive is the only solution on the market today that gives you that ability.

We also re-designed the client and it is now using a new disk format. The new format is much more reliable and has better performance, especially if you are running a LivePC off of a USB flash drive that can be suddenly removed. Users running v1.x LivePCs will need to manually migrate to 2.0 to take advantage of the new features. The migration process is pretty straightforward. Export the LivePC with v1.x Creator and then import it using the v2.0 Creator. Here is a detailed document to walk you through it [link]. Let us know if you need help.

Stay in touch with the MokaFive blog for information and perspective on the concerns and trends related to the modernization of enterprise desktop computing. We invite your feedback, questions and opinions - starting with the announcement of MokaFive Suite.

If you're on Twitter, follow us at http://twitter.com/MokaFive

Virtualization: Hype vs Reality, Part II

2009-06-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

And we’re back with Part II of our series on what is hype and what is reality when it comes virtualization. Here is our perspective on two more topics that are getting a lot of play lately:

Reality: Virtualization is cheaper than other traditional infrastructures

Obviously a major issue for anyone in any industry right now is cost. People are looking to save money in every way they can. In light of this, many vendors in the virtualization space are chiming in about how their products and solutions can help you cut costs. Is this true? For the most part yes. BUT it’s not quite so black and white, so let’s break it down.

A desktop virtualization deployment can save you money in terms of management and support, but it can potentially be more expensive than a traditional deployment – it all depends on how it you approach it.

Right off the bat a VDI deployment costs 20-30% more from a CAPEX perspective than a traditional physical desktop deployment. However, once it’s up and running the deployment can make it much easier and cheaper to manage your IT infrastructure in the long run, *if* you do it right.

For instance, if you go with the model of creating one image for each user, the deployment will not scale and it will end up being just as expensive to store and manage the virtual desktops as it would in a traditional physical desktop deployment, if not more expensive.

To achieve real cost savings and make up the CAPEX expenditure, you need to leverage virtualization to make IT more scalable. What does this mean? Creating one golden image that goes out to all of your users or to large groups of users.

Hype: Remote display is the way to go

Remote display can work well, but only in very specific environments.

Remote desktop is fast over LAN, but slow over thin pipes.

Gigabit LAN to the server can achieve speeds nearly indistinguishable from local execution but at a much higher cost.

Low-latency WAN connections can get acceptable performance but only if
they are not using any graphically intensive applications.

High-latency WAN connections are not viable for real-world usage.

Basically what it comes down to is that there are fundamental limitations to the interactive performance of applications across low bandwidth and high latency links, and we are getting close to the limit. Remote desktop just does not work well over wireless networks or on laptops.

So what do we recommend? For applications that require a high refresh rate or rich graphics, a locally executed solution is always going to offer the best performance, no matter what. Remote execution will always face speed of light limitations even with the fastest of connections.

Virtualization: Hype vs Reality

2009-06-03T17:32:00.000-07:00

These days there is a lot of talk about virtualization, desktop and otherwise. With all this chatter it is understandable that people are confused about what is what. We thought it would be useful to sort through some of it and separate the hype from the reality.

Hype: Virtualization as the hot new, “it” technology

There is a huge amount of hype around virtualization, and it is being positioned as a brand-new cutting edge technology to solve all your IT needs. But virtualization is far from a new thing. It's been around a very long time, in computer time at least. Virtualization is a core concept in computer systems and has been in use since at least the days of the IBM Mainframes. The remote desktop model of centralized execution is a throwback to the 1970s with dumb terminals connecting to the big mainframe in the back room. (Take the old IBM literature, change the names and you could pass it off as a VDI architecture diagram.) As we develop new technologies and approaches, desktop virtualization has evolved and become more sophisticated, and thus more useful – providing us today a real solution to serious computing needs.

Hype: Virtualization provides poor performance

The second common myth we keep hearing about virtualization is that it is slow. People think that using virtualization implies a negative performance impact. The truth is a bit more complicated.

Virtualization adds a level of indirection, which implies some kind of overhead. The two primary considerations for systems performance is CPU (processing) overhead and IO overhead. It makes sense to separate these considerations:

CPU overhead: With modern virtual machine monitors running on modern CPUs, the CPU overhead is insubstantial. Some operations can be slower with virtualization (for example, system calls or page table manipulation), but modern VMMs are now generally able to work around these issues, leveraging techniques like dynamic recompilation and paravirtualization. Intel and AMD have also added hardware virtualization support in their recent CPUs. It depends on the particular workload, but the CPU overhead from virtualization is typically a few percent at most.

IO overhead: IO intensive applications can see a bigger performance hit due to virtualization because the extra indirection can be more costly. However, IO performance hits can often be reduced or eliminated by tuning the system.

While factors like these need to be taken into consideration
to get optimum performance when using desktop virtualization, there are other
advantages that offer immediate performance benefits:

Virtualization enables performance optimizations at a different level. The extra level of indirection inherent in virtualization can be used to improve overall system performance by optimizing at a whole-system level. For example, virtualization allows you to share hardware resources and quickly adjust based on demand, leading to better overall system performance.

The VMM can even use compression and caching to improve the IO performance beyond its native performance levels. We've seen numerous examples of applications that run faster under virtualization due to these effects.

A virtual machine can actually boot faster than a physical machine because the load order is predictable and the VMM can rearrange the blocks.

On the server side, it is easy to migrate VMMs, or quickly launch new ones to handle changes in load.

With desktop virtualization, you can boot from a golden image every time, eliminating slowdown from Windows rot. Also, because you can rejuvenate the system image, you don't need to run virus scans of the system image. Using anti-virus software typically slows the machine more than virtualization does.

Basically, running on a VMM is like running on a different computer architecture. If you take an application that was tuned for one architecture and run it on another, sometimes you will take a performance hit, but through tweaking and tuning you can usually erase the deficit. Virtualization is no different. A virtualized architecture also opens a bunch of new possibilities that can improve performance.

Hype: Virtualization uses less energy

Virtualization actually adds overhead, so cycle-for-cycle it will usually consume more power rather than less. BUT power savings with virtualization ARE possible, leading to greater energy efficiency. Here’s how:

Consolidating many old, underutilized servers into a single server can save a lot of energy.

Power savings can also be achieved simply by moving to newer, more energy efficient machines.

There are also other variables that affect whether or not implementing desktop virtualization will save you power. If you are moving into the data center, it depends on the machine utilization - if you have many desktop machines sitting idle all the time, you will use less power but if the endpoint machines are fairly well-utilized already, it will impact your power usage more. Implementing power-saving modes on desktops is one thing you can do to move towards power savings in any environment.

Really what it comes down to is that power and cooling in the data center is very expensive, regardless of your architecture. It is necessary to provision your data center to handle worst-case scenarios of peak load, but since most loads vary greatly you are most likely going to end up either massively over-provisioning or risk unacceptable performance and downtime during peak periods. That’s a reality – virtualization or not.

Stay tuned - we'll be debunking some more of the myths surrounding virtualization in coming posts. This is obviously an important topic and one that is hot on everyone's minds right now. For more thoughts and another perspective, check out Scott Key's recent post on virtualization.info.

MokaFive is a finalist for RSA Conference 2009 "Most Innovative Company"

2009-04-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

MokaFive was recently named as a top ten finalist for the RSA Conference 2009 "Most Innovative Company" award. Thanks to all the users who voted for us! We will be at the RSA Conference here in San Francisco vying for the title. Come by and see us at the Innovation Sandbox on Monday, April 20th. We will be showing off the latest MokaFive product with some cool technology demonstrations, like instant recovery from zero-day infection (like the Conficker worm) without losing data, keylogger protection so you can compute securely on a potentially insecure host, and secure remote kill so you can disable LivePC images and wipe data remotely.

Desktop Virtualization short video on ZDNet

2009-01-05T20:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice short (<3 min) whiteboard presentation I did on desktop virtualization for ZDNet. If you want a super high-level view of desktop virtualization that contrasts different approaches, this provides a good "executive overview". Let me know what you think.

MokaFive on Startup City TV

2008-11-02T22:08:00.000-08:00

Here's a short video interview we did with Startup City TV a while back. It's a good overview of what MokaFive is about.

MokaFive Presentation

2008-06-28T22:59:00.000-07:00

David Elliston, Development Architect from SAP Labs, presents how SAP delivers their demo software for their sales team using MokaFive.

Interview with Hacker Public Radio

2008-02-22T09:55:00.000-08:00

I recently did an on-air interview with droops from Hacker Public Radio about MokaFive and open source. You can listen to the interview here.

Moka5 video from one of our younger users

2008-01-06T22:17:00.000-08:00

Today I ran across a video made by one of our younger users on how to use Moka5 to run Ubuntu alongside Windows or Mac:

He recorded the whole thing live and showed how to build a Ubuntu LivePC from scratch in just a few minutes. Quite impressive!

Microsoft making moves in the Desktop Virtualization space

2008-01-01T22:38:00.000-08:00

Microsoft announced today
some pretty aggressive moves in the desktop virtualization space.
First, they announced their acquisition of Calista Technologies, which
optimizes the remote display protocol used in hosted and other VDI-like
solutions. Technology like Calista's, along with their alliance with
Citrix, are important to VDI-like solutions to give end-users an
acceptable user experience, especially with interactive or
multimedia-rich applications.

Microsoft also loosened Vista virtualization licensing to allow
Vista Home Basic and Home Premium to be run on a virtual machine. This
is good news for all involved, as users no longer have to spend the
extra money on the more expensive Vista Business or Ultimate editions
just to run them in a virtual machine. They also announced official
support for Microsoft Office running as a virtualized application.

Both of these are more aggressive moves than is typical of
Microsoft. This really shows the importance of desktop virtualization
to Microsoft's future strategy and markets. The licensing change also
shows Microsoft is serious about pursuing the vision of virtualization
on the desktop and the flexibility that it provides. I also think
Microsoft realized that users and IT administrators want the
flexibility provided by virtualization, and that virtualization makes
it easy to run any operating system. Vista adoption has not been going
well by any account, and virtualization support may tip more companies
into trying out and adopting Vista in the enterprise.

However, by embracing a VDI solution, Microsoft may be missing the
boat. VDI and other remote desktop techniques still have some
fundamental technical limitations: they require a server
infrastructure, the performance is poor over slow or high-latency
connections, and users cannot work offline. These run counter to the
recent trends of more and more people working from home or on the road,
or the trend of using individual employee's computers for work. These
and other reasons are why, as part of the NSF-backed Collective computing initiative
at Stanford in 2001, we started working on the next generation of
desktop management, which combined the benefits of VDI's centralized
management with the benefits of local execution. This work ultimately
culminated in the basis of MokaFive technology.

Pictures from Moka5 holiday party

2007-12-19T16:22:00.000-08:00

Here are some pictures from our party last week.

| View | Upload your own

Talk at Stanford Open Source Group tonight

2007-11-13T13:22:00.000-08:00

I'll be giving a presentation on Moka5 at the Stanford Open Source Group this evening, at 6:45pm in Gates Room 104. (Coincidentally, it's the same room where I defended my Ph.D. dissertation what seems like ages ago.) If you are in the Bay Area, please drop by to get some free Moka5 swag and hear more about some of the cool stuff we are doing at Moka5.

moka5 Interviews

2007-10-22T10:24:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple interviews that we have done recently.
The first one was at VMworld 2007. As you can see, we had a very nice booth there:

Another one was at SOA Conference 2007 East. John, one of our founders, was interviewed by
SYS-CON.TV.

Check them out.

Another great show at VMworld 2007

2007-09-20T17:58:00.000-07:00

We have talked to so many people at the show and a lot of people are interested in our technology. Our website traffic and the software downloads have been doubled since VMworld. This is really exciting!!

Here are some blog posting about moka5:

http://julian14632.blogspot.com/

http://www.macnews.de/

http://www.virtualization.info/

http://www.macwindows.com/

http://networking-world.blogspot.com/

http://www.networkworld.com/

Here are some of the pictures:

Hope we will see you again next year.

moka5 Party at VMworld

2007-09-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

We are having an exclusive/invitation only party at VMworld 2007. It's at a very nice place in San Francisco. We have a few spaces open. If you are in town for VMworld and if you want to join the party, please send an email to support@moka5.com with a subject line "VMworld party." We will randomly pick a few lucky winners to join us for free food and free drinks.

Looking forward to meet you all at VMworld.

moka5 will be at VMworld 2007

2007-08-28T17:54:00.000-07:00

Since this year VMworld is in San Francisco, a lot of us will be able to attend. We will be at booth #933. Stop by and check out the latest release of the LivePC Engine from moka5.

moka5 will be at the Flash Memory Summit and Linux World

2007-08-03T16:41:00.000-07:00

Flash Memory Summit will be held next week (August 7-9) at the Santa Clara Marriott, CA. Dr. Monica Lam, our founder and Chief Scientist, will have a round table discussion on "Consumer Applications" at 6:00PM, Wednesday and a panel discussion on "Future Consumer Products" at 11:00am on Thursday. You can find more info here.

Our CEO, Bill Demas, will be attending the LinuxWorld VIP Cocktail Reception on August 8 in San Francisco. A few of us will be checking out the exhibition hall. If anyone wants to meet us at the LinuxWorld, please let us know.

moka5 LivePC Engine on an IronKey with hardware encryption

2007-07-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

We have a lot of cool toys here. This time we have a very nice looking encrypted USB memory stick from IronKey and we have used it to run LivePCs.

It provides military-grade encryption in a tamper-proof & water
proof metal case. It has secure backup and password management. One of
the most interesting feature is if someone tries to guess your password
and if he/she gets it wrong ten times, the key will erase all the data
and destroy itself!!

We have been playing with the beta version for a couple of months
and it works great with moka5 LivePCs. Its write speed is a little bit
slower than our fastest USB stick but its read speed is quite good.
moka5 LivePC runs off it without any issue.

If you want more security when you are carrying around your LivePC, go get yourself an IronKey at: https://store.ironkey.com/.

Set it up, install moka5 Engine on the secure drive, and you are ready to go.

Here are more photos: