Mokafive aka Moka5

I just started working with this new product I wanted share with you all. It's called Mokafive. It's basically a VMware based product that makes it much easier to manage VMware images. (A VMWare image is a virtual version of a computer environment. Think of it as a software-based computer running inside your real computer).

For example, say I have 4 different VMware images that I share with users in my organization on a regular basis. The first challenge I have is distribution. If my users are local, I could just give them instructions on where they could download the images. However, these images large (3-10 gig usually). So, if they're remote users, this starts to become almost impracticle. Worse yet, what if I make a change to one of the VMware images and I need to get everyone of my users updated to the newer image? Do I tell them all to simply re-download the image? Think about it... even if it was just 20 users and they were all trying to download 5 gig images off the server on the same day. How good is that going to be for LAN traffic?

It's reasonable to expect that with patches, policies, and software updates occuring quite regularly, that these images would need to be refreshed, at a minimum, every month. But, probably sooner.

Well, this is what Mokafive does really well. It does three things:
1. provides a slick and friendly interface for users to pull down the images they need (there could be more than one image).
2. silently sends the deltas (only the changes) to the users machines when I make a change to the master image.
3. provides the user with a friendly menu so they can choose which image to launch.

Here's a screen shot of the user interface:


In the above picture, this menu contains the five different demonstration environment (VMWare images) that can be launched from the Mokafive menu. The little green circle with the black arrow is the START button, but you probably figured that out by now.

And, not every user has to have the same menu. As the admin, I can control who can get what. Or, I can decide in advance "this is what you're getting whether you like it or not" ;-D

Moreover, an admin can control the versioning too. When an updated image is distributed. If there's a problem with it, you can roll-back to just about any point at which you saved a previous version.

I'll probably be talking more about this cool little tool. But, that's enough for now.

I'm curious to hear from anyone else who's using M5. And, I'll freely admin when I'm wrong, so if anything I wrote might be in error, I'd sure like to hear about it.

:-)