VMworld 2010: Great Show

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

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

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

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

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

It’s Official: MokaFive Goes BareMetal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products & Marketing

Introducing MokaFive on BareMetal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purnima Padmanabhan, VP of Products and Marketing