MokaFive today announced the 2.0 version of its desktop virtualization technology in the form of MokaFive Suite, a Desktop-as-a-Service platform for the enterprise. MokaFive Suite extends the company’s existing cross-platform, self-healing hosted desktop service, giving organizations of any size the ability to host a secure desktop management solution within their premises.
MokaFive’s robust management capabilities make it easy for IT administrators to centrally create, deliver, secure and update a fully contained virtual desktop, called LivePC, to thousands of users. LivePC images run locally, so end users simply download their secure virtual desktop via a Web link, and run it on any computer (Macintosh, Linux or Windows). IT administrators apply updates and patches to the single golden image and MokaFive automatically distributes the differentials to each LivePC.
MokaFive Suite integrates with existing enterprise infrastructure such as Active Directory and software distribution for rapid set up and maximum leverage of current investments. Enterprise companies using MokaFive Suite experience a significantly lower total cost of ownership due to a small datacenter footprint, quick deployment, and simplified management.
Unlike any other desktop virtualization solution, MokaFive enables end users to customize their virtual corporate desktop with personalized data, settings and even applications. MokaFive’s proprietary layered management approach allows IT administrators to create, deliver, patch and update the corporate OS and applications while persisting the user specific customizations. This approach enables IT to define a single image that can be customized for groups and further personalized by individual users, providing all the benefits of central management with the power of mass customization.
MokaFive Suite provides a rich set of capabilities and policy controls, which allow IT administrators to define levels of lockdown based on targeted groups. Organizations are able to protect corporate assets and ensure compliance against regulatory and corporate guidelines, irrespective of where the user is accessing the corporate data from home, work or on the go. In addition to reducing the risk of non-compliance and data breaches, MokaFive can keep business running with instantaneous deployment of corporate environments in the case of a disaster.
Desktop management costs are reduced thanks to a unique self-healing feature that provides users with the ability to recover from failures by simply restarting their LivePC. This reverts the corporate operating system and applications to their original pristine state while persisting user applications, settings and data.
MokaFive tells CURRENT USERS TO GO STRAIGHT TO “Start Over”:
Thought you could create a virtual pc and never need to set-up a pc ever again? Not with MokaFive. Anyone who built a virtual pc using MokaFive over the last 3 years will need to do it over again from scratch. MokaFive just released 2.0, which does not support 1.x LivePCs, as they like to call their virtual machines. The “manual migration” offered by MokaFive is not applicable if you used MokaFive’s standard set-up, which included a separate personal disk. So much for reliability.
The MokaFive staff apparently anticipated some anger from current users because they eliminated user forums from their site and do not accept comments on their blog. Good luck complaining.
MokaFive Version 1.x looked very promising in my environment (computer science professor), but it was too good to be true. After preparing a VM for class use in 1.x, I found out the hard way that this was to be a “risky, marketing-only” environment that would be ripped away from me.
I wouldn’t have minded that, and I was prepared to pay a reasonable price to migrate to Version 2. But then I found that there were “minimums” to use MocaFive after Version 1.x . For example, I would have to buy 50 licenses minimum, which I don’t need to do, since each class we teach is only about half that size.
Still not discouraged, I generated a sample USB stick at school to test out Version 2. It generated fine, but would not run at school under Windows XP / SP2. I had checked the configuration requirements, but even though they matched, I would get a message whenever I started a VM that something was amiss with the VMware player, and the LivePC could not run (it gave a return code of 0!). I then took the USB stick home, mounted it on my Windows Vista machine, and it worked fine. I reported this to MokaFive, but they were so busy trying to sell me 50 seats that they never answered the basic question of why the samples wouldn’t work at school.
As such, even though I think the product is probably great for IT organizations that can afford it, I am returning to basic VMware. It’s more work to implement and distribute VMs that way, but at least one can control costs a bit better. It’s also important to control your own environment from semester to semester, and I wouldn’t have had that with current MokaFive policies, either.
VMware has a much better plan to deal with educational institutions. It surprises me that MocaFive, coexisting with VMware people as they do, evidently does not. Apparently, they’re just planning to go after the “bigger guys”.