INSIGHT | VIRTUALISATION MokaFive MokaFive, which has been trying to put the VDI pieces together at the right time and right place for six years, may finally be at the correct convergence coordinates. “We take the simple idea of ‘How do we allow the end user to use any device he or she wants, and at the same time protect the whole corporation—with no changes, no adds or anything?’” CEO Dale Fuller told eWEEK. The client-side MokaFive v3.0 “lets me, as a corporation, have my entire container of my image safe and secure, controlled by me, from the cloud. However, my users get to execute it locally. “And they get to run it on a Mac, if they want to. Or a Windows machine or a Linux machine. That becomes the interesting thing,” Fuller adds. This is especially gratifying for Fuller, who put in two tenures of employment at Apple and managed its PowerBook PC division for the enterprise at one point. Now Fuller has a product that can go a long way toward getting the Mac OS into the enterprise, albeit by a back door—desktop virtualization. MokaFive is now available for iPads and iPhones, and the Android version isn’t far behind. The company’s MyLivePC can run Windows on iPads (Flash supporters reading this are probably celebrating) and Mac OS on Windows.
Virtual Computer Virtual Computer calls its clientside hypervisor Distributed Desktop Virtualisation. “We’re working on a deal now with Lenovo that will have our hypervisor running on a whole different class of machine—everything from laptops to desktops,” CEO Dan McCall told eWEEK.
What is Virtualisation? Virtualisation software is a special type of software that allows a business to set up a virtual machine or virtual network in their organization. All your computers can use the same physical resource through a guest operating system, which the virtualisation software creates.
Why Virtualisation? It allows consolidation of servers and increase operational efficiency It conserves energy and turns office or business into a “green” business It’s easier to manage several virtual machines than several real machines You can reduce your backup and recovery time Testing software configurations are more streamlined You can use old software applications that may not be compatible with new operating systems by setting up a virtual machine just for them You can run cross-platform applications easier and more efficiently Source: http://thecloudguytim.wordpress.com
“Taking laptops aside—because that’s a different segment of the market [since they are not ‘tethered’ machines]—there’s actual overlap between the high end of the thin-client line and the low end of the desktop line, with the low end of desktops probably getting more performance than thin clients,” he adds. Virtual computer gives users some choices within deployments, which could include a mix of desktops, laptops and other mobile devices. “We try not to get too religious about how you want to run virtualization,” McCall said. “We allow you to lay down our product, NxTop, at the base layer for all these devices—which are all essentially personal computers. Then you make the choice about whether
Kaviza VDI-in-a-Box is a plug-andplay virtual desktop system that basically anyone can get started to run for a small or midsize business. 36
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you want to run your workload in the data center on VMware ESX or a Citrix XenServer environment, or run your virtual machine locally. That’s really the innovation we’re providing to this market right now,” he adds. Virtual Computer’s NxTop 3.1 RC1 will be available for download April 19.
XenClient Citrix obtained XenClient as a result of its $500 million acquisition of XenSource in 2007. XenClient is a high-performance hypervisor (not open source) that runs directly on the client device hardware. It partitions resources of the virtual machine, enabling multiple operating systems to run side by side in complete isolation. XenClient does not stand alone on the client. It needs to work in tandem with Citrix Receiver and Synchronizer for XenClient in order for the central management to work. XenClient was developed to work with the hardware virtualisation in Intel’s vPro platform, which enables better security and provides direct access to the full graphics capabilities of the device.