The last time virtualization.info covered the US startup MokaFive was in April, to report about a third round of funding equal to $21M, and in May to report about a new version of its flagship product called Suite.
MokaFive Suite 2.8, released almost one year since version 2.0, didn’t introduce any new feature but the support for an additional virtualization engine: Oracle VM VirtualBox.
Over the last four years the company changed its go-to-market strategy a couple of times, and the decision to support side-by-side VMware and Oracle hosted virtualization platforms is a demonstration that MokaFive is still trying to figure out how to position itself in the most effective way.
Now the strategy may change again as the startup just announced the development of a client hypervisor: MokaFive BareMetal.
MokaFive core technology is what we call a security wrapper here at virtualization.info: a layer that surrounds virtual machines and enforces security policies for network access, expiration, encryption, etc., defined from a remote, central management console.
Applying this to a client hypervisor means that MokaFive BareMetal is trying to blend together the approach of two competitors: Virtual Computer (remote management) and Neocleus (out-of-band security).
The company didn’t unveil what hypervisor is powering the new platform, but it’s safe to assume that it is Xen. But if so, it’s unclear why MokaFive preferred to develop its own client hypervisor rather than build on top of Citrix XenClient.
In any case, it’s a rather interesting choice: on one hand there is VMware, the current virtualization market leader, which says that hosted virtualization is the best choice for client hypervisors, and on the other hand there is the startup MokaFive, which has a technology for hosted virtualization platforms but it’s moving on bare metal.