| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer Software |
| Founded | California 2005 |
| Headquarters | Redwood City, California |
| Products | Moka Five Creator/Player/Service |
| Website | mokafive.com |
MokaFive, (formerly Moka5) headquartered in Redwood City, California, provides a desktop-as-a-service platform for managing desktop computers. MokaFive was founded in July 2005 as a spinoff of the Collective Project in Stanford University's Computer Science Department. MokaFive's main product, MokaFive Suite, allows users to create, run, distribute and manage LivePCs, which are complete, managed virtual computing environments.
MokaFive Suite is a virtual desktop management solution designed to be agnostic with respect to the virtual machine monitor. It is currently ported to VMware Player, but includes additional features that are required for managing virtual desktops in an enterprise environment. These features include automatic updates of virtual machines, streaming and caching of virtual machine images, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics support, and zero-footprint install when running from a USB drive.[1]
AVG Anti-Virus is now integrated into the MokaFive virtual desktop management suite to provide the industry’s first complete solution for a secure virtual desktop that can be deployed directly on the end user’s personal machines. The solution enables consumers that work for enterprises to use AVG’s free software to protect their personal workspace, while at the same time assuring that sensitive corporate information contained in the virtual desktop is always kept safe.
Contents |
MokaFive was founded in July 2005 by Stanford Professor Monica Lam with her students Ramesh Chandra, Constantine Sapuntzakis, and John Whaley under the name SkyBlue Technologies.[2] They received their first round of funding from Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures ($1 million followed by $2.26 million).[3][4]
MokaFive had its beginnings as a four-year NSF-funded research project at Stanford University called "The Collective: A Virtual Appliance Computing Infrastructure".[5] The Collective project was started by the Stanford SUIF group, headed by Prof. Monica Lam, Prof. Mendel Rosenblum, and Prof. Dan Boneh. The objective was "to develop a new computing system architecture that is secure, reliable, easy to administer, and provides ubiquitous access to users' computing environments."[6]
The Collective project began in 1999 with the exploration of a stateless thin-client architecture, a la Sun Ray, where computation would occur on a centralized server.[7] A thin-client architecture had the advantage of centralized management and allowing a user's data to live in the network, but it had some serious flaws: namely, it was not possible to work while disconnected (e.g. on a disconnected laptop or an unreliable network connection), it required a substantial server infrastructure, and it required a high-bandwidth low-latency network, which was not always possible with distant remote offices.
To address the flaws of the thin-client model, the Collective group developed a new system where a centrally-managed virtual machine would run locally on the user's computer.[8] In this way, they were able to get the benefits of the thin-client model (easy management and administration) without many of the downsides (reliance on server infrastructure and fast network connection, no disconnected operation). The Collective architecture was presented in a paper at the HotOS conference in May 2003. This paper first coined the term Virtual Appliance, later picked up by VMware. Later publications in LISA 2003 and NSDI 2005 expanded upon this idea.[9][10]
As of roughly 19:12 pm (GMT) on 5 April 2008 the MokaFive website changed dramatically. The new website is http://www.mokafive.com.
As of 22 June 2009[update], there are two MokaFive products:[11]
MokaFive Suite is an installable Desktop-as-a-Service platform, a software solution that enterprises or service providers could use to provide and manage virtual desktops to their customers. MokaFive Service is a subscription-based, hosted service, provided by MokaFive itself, that allows customers to manage virtual desktops without having to install and maintain the server components.
MokaFive consists of four main components: Player, Creator, Enterprise Server and Console.[12] Users use the Player to run LivePC images on their local computers. Running images locally allows users to run images offline as well as online.
Players check in periodically with the MokaFive Enterprise Server for any updates. IT administrators can efficiently update a single image and centrally control policies, and the Enterprise Server takes care of the distribution.
MokaFive Enterprise Server compresses image files and sends the differences in the image, which reduces update time and bandwidth utilization. LivePC images are virtual desktop images in a MokaFive format. Existing VMware images can be converted into LivePC images using the Creator. The same image can be run on either Windows or Macintosh computers.
Unlike standard virtual machine images, LivePC images have features that make it particularly adapted for desktop management:
MokaFive Players are used to control and run LivePC images. Players can be installed through AD GPOs, distributed on pre-installed USB devices, or users can download the Player installer and perform a self-installation.
Players provide many features designed for improved end-user experience and enterprise IT desktop management:[14]
MokaFive Enterprise Server is a lightweight, secure management platform. It can be horizontally scaled, and images can be stored locally for remote offices, to reduce WAN utilization. MokaFive Enterprise Server integrates with a corporate AD server, for authentication and targeting.
MokaFive Player embeds the free VMware Player as its virtualization platform. It adds several additional features to the standard VMware Player:
MokaFive inherits many of the limitations of VMware Player, including no support for IEEE-1394/FireWire and certain other hardware devices. However, MokaFive claims that its software is technically independent of the embedded virtual machine platform and that they will support other VMs.
As is the case with any desktop virtualization solution, MokaFive LivePCs include the operating system. Thus it requires an operating system license for each LivePC, which is a consideration when the operating system is not free. Including the entire operating system also makes LivePCs larger and require more memory than using, for example, application virtualization.
On June 29, 2009, MokaFive released version 2.0, which replaced "user disks" with layering of virtual PCs. This innovation allows users to easily install software on their virtual machine copy. But users who created machines under version 1.x will need to start over. MokaFive's manual migration procedure does not support current users who used the standard configuration for their live pc. Concurrently, MokaFive removed user forums from their website.