MokaFive Blog

Submitted by Kelvin Yue on June 28, 2008 - 11:30am.

It's been an exciting time here at MokaFive. Today, we announced the general availability of the MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution. This has been a culmination of many years of effort, dating back to my days as a graduate student in the Stanford Computer Science Department where the founders speculated that there had to be a better way to manage PCs. That line of research led to the NSF-backed Collective Project and the founding of MokaFive in July 2005.

Virtualization has a lot of hype around it and the term means different things to different people. Fundamentally, virtualization is about adding a layer of separation between entities that have traditionally been stuck together. Your physical hardware and your software have traditionally been stuck together so it was difficult to move from one machine to another or to use the same image across different kinds of hardware. Virtualization gives you the flexibility to separate the software from the hardware, so you can easily move and replicate environments between machines, run multiple computers on the same physical machine, and manage your computers.

MokaFive's key insights have been around separating concerns that have traditionally been stuck together, to give a “best of both worlds” solution. Before MokaFive, “centralized desktop management” meant running the desktops on a server in a datacenter, so users could not work offline or use highly interactive applications with 3D graphics and video. With MokaFive, we separated these concerns so the administrator has all of the benefits of centralized management, but the execution happens on the local machine so the users can work offline and get good performance. Another key insight was the separation of system state and user state so you can manage them independently. Normally when you revert to a previous version, you lose all of your changes whether important or not. But with MokaFive users can rejuvenate the system while keeping all of their important user data like documents and customizations.

Another example is lockdown versus flexibility; two concerns that were typically seen as diametric opposites. At MokaFive we separated these concerns to give a system that allows lockdown and control in the places you need it (for example, for compliance issues or for ease of management) but also gives you the extra flexibility in the places you want it (for example, by allowing users to use any PC or carry their environment on a USB drive). So we have a system where both the IT administrators and the end users see the benefits and are asking for. And I believe that ultimately for a desktop management solution to succeed it must give benefits to both administrators and end users.

The Virtual Desktop Solution we released today is not the end goal, but rather just the first step towards a set of products and features to vastly improve the way PC management is done. Rest assured, we will continue to innovate and provide solutions that address both the needs of the administrator as well as the needs of the end user.

Submitted by John Whaley on May 20, 2008 - 5:52pm.

We are going to be at IDC Virtualization Forum West on April 8, 2008 and IDC Virtualization Forum East on May 7, 2008. We will be showcasing our latest-and-greatest products there. Come check us out!!

Submitted by Kelvin on March 19, 2008 - 1:34pm.

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.

Submitted by John Whaley on February 22, 2008 - 5:07pm.

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.

Submitted by John Whaley on January 22, 2008 - 2:37pm.