by
Brian Madden
We've talked a lot about layering over the past few years. (If you're not familiar with the concept, Gabe wrote a great intro article in 2009.) We've also seen a fair amount of products that offer some sort of layering capability, including Atlantis, MokaFive, Unidesk, Wanova... probably others I'm forgetting. And now that user virtualization vendors like AppSense and RES are talking about supporting user-installed apps, they themselves are getting pretty close to offering full-fledged laying products.
And while the architecture of Microsoft Windows means we'll probably never get that perfect "nirvana" layering product, there are a lot of scenarios where layering really makes sense.
So ok, we've got products that do layering, and we have scenarios where layering makes sense. The problem is that these two things don't always align. For instance, if you already have a desktop virtualization environment built and running, are you going to rip out your current product just to add one with a layering capability?
Meanwhile, in Redwood City...
Today's article is about MokaFive. Those familiar with MokaFive know that they have a client-based virtual desktop management solution (which supports both Type 2 and bare metal hypervisors). They handle the imaging, provisioning, management, backup, security, and deprovisioning of client VMs an disks.
As part of their solution, they developed a layering capability. First released in 2009, it's now pretty advanced. The main problem, frankly, is that you have to buy MokaFive's suite to get it. But if you want datacenter-based desktops, it doesn't really work. If you already have Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View, are you going to then buy MokaFive and try and mix it in? Not only are you spending a lot of extra money, you'll also end up with two completely different management systems for your disks, your policies, your users, etc.
So to that end, MokaFive has decided to release their layering capability as a standalone product. This is something they'll provide in an OEM capacity for other vendors (Quest Software, for example) as well as (hopefully) selling it directly to end user customers.
MokaFive "Virtual Layers"
Since it's not a real product yet, MokaFive doesn't really have a name for this layering capability. Right now they're sort of calling it MokaFive Virtual Layers or "Project Filo," (which is kinda like "file" and kinda like "phyllo" dough. You know...the one with the layers. Get it?)
The MokaFive virtual layer thing does NOT have it's own console. Really it's nothing more than their layering driver which can take a bunch of volumes (OS, apps, and user, for instance) and merge them together to provide the seamless single "image" to Windows while still allowing each layer to be backed up or updated independently.
The great thing about their product is that it's OS-, hardware-, and hypervisor-agnostic. They want to build a secure, managed, personalized container that can work anywhere. As for how you deliver, manage, update, move around, and secure the layers, well, that's up to you! (That's kind of the whole point of this product. If you want a solution that has that too, then you should buy the real MokaFive product. :)
How it works
Fundamentally MokaFive's Virtual Layers is just a file system driver that simply combines three separate disk volumes into a single logical C: drive that Windows sees. I was able to play with a prototype of this capability, and I literally built a Win7 VM with three disks: system.vhd, apps.vhd, and user.vhd. But once I had Windows installed with the MokaFive driver, all I saw in Windows explorer was a C: drive.
Then I could install whatever apps I wanted to. I could save data. I could do anything. The whole time the MokaFive driver was splitting up everything I was doing between the three volumes as it determined it should.
Then, playing the role of "admin," I created a second VM and pointed it to just the system.vhd. I booted it up, made some system-level changes, and shut it down. Then when I booted up my first VM again (with the three volumes, including the newly-patched system.vhd) I now had a patched OS complete with my own user apps and data from before the admin touched it.
Cool!
Doing all of this with their prototype was a very manual process requiring a lot of editing the configuration of the VMs and pointing them to different VHDs and stuff. But really that's kind of the point. If I were using the MokaFive layering in a real environment I would hook that into my existing system--whatever that happens to be. (SCVMM or vWorkspace or XenCenter or vCenter or a bucketload of PowerShell scripts or...)
As I said, fundamentally there's nothing in MokaFive's layering solution that precludes any specific architecture. Really any hypervisor, local storage, remote, whatever, should work. In fact fundamentally it should work without a hypervisor using physical disks and/or mounting VHD files directly.
This architecture also means that in addition to working on any hyervisor, you could also use just about any disk architecture you wanted. (Maybe you put the system volume locally on an SSD drive on each VDI host while you map the app and user layers to shared storage.)
Updating the MokaFive Virtual Layers is easy too. There's no "tool" or anything to capture changes. You don't need to put the layer in a special mode or anything. Really all you do it just boot the system layer in a read/write way and just make your changes. Then push that out (or make it available or whatever you're doing) to your users.
Why?
In the most basic sense, the concept of layering provides a few advantages:
- Smaller capacity, because you can get the benefits of persistent "user-owned" disks while leveraging the efficiencies of sharing the system disk.
- Easier updates, because instead of running some process that updates the system disks of each of your users, you can just update the shared system disks and the users sort of "instantly" get that when they next boot or whatever.
- Easy backup, since all the important user data is in the user layer, you just have to backup that one single file. (Or if a user moves to a new machine, it's easy to deliver that one file which will include everything he or she needs.)
Layering drawbacks
There are several different ways that layering can be done (as we know since there are a lot of companies doing layering). Those who are doing it within Windows, like MokaFive, feel they have an advantage over those who do it from the outside at the storage level.
When approached from the storage side, layering is typically done at the disk block-level. This means that there's a single master shared disk image that lots of VMs use (meaning the master is read-only). Then when individual VMs need to save their "writes," they do so by writing them into another disk image that only contains their own personal changes. So each VM's system disk is really two disk images: the shared read-only master and the personal read/write "delta."
So far, so good...until an admin wants to update the master. The problem is that since this is all block level stuff, when you make any change to the master, you invalidate all of the "delta" layers for each VM--it's a very destructive thing. The solution is to try to redirect as many of the settings and file changes you can to a third volume (something akin to a "user data disk"), but unless you have some kind of additional third party software to do this, you're never going to catch everything.
This is the main reason why I never really liked thin provisioning or linked clones or any of the other storage-based disk sharing solutions, and it's one of the main reasons that the vast majority of VDI implementations today simply use 1-to-1 persistent disk images instead of these sharing techniques.
MokaFive, on the other hand (along with other vendors) is doing it right since they're doing layering inside Windows at the file level. Of course the file level is not 100% perfect either. I mean what happens if you apply an update to the system layer which is fundamentally incompatible with an application the user has installed into their own app layer? ?? ????
This is where MokaFive claims that their two years of production support of layering comes in. They claim to have lots of experience with these "bad apps" and "bad updates" that their policy engine (which determines which files get written to which layer) can work around these challenges. MokaFive's CTO John Whaley also explained that there are things customers can do to minimize the chance that you'll have a conflict between layers. Treating the system layer like a gold master, for example, and only allowing IT admins to make changes instead of general users, is a good start. (This means that you'd turn of auto updates and stuff and control the releases and updates to system layer yourself.)
Layering isn't app virtualization, and it's not user virtualization.
Ok, so historically we've had "app virtualization" which isolates the changes an app makes as it's installed and puts them into a separate package (or "layer"). Then we had user virtualization which isolates the changes that a user makes throughout his or her session and redirects them to a certain location (or "layer"). And now we have these layering products that attempt to do that with all changes.
So app virtualization, user virtualization, and layering: how do these all mix? What's the difference?
The user virtualization vendors have been making a pretty big deal over the past few months about the fact that they're not application virtualization nor do their products replace app virtualization. (In fact the two work hand-in-hand.) The same can be said about MokaFive's virtual layers when compared to both app virtualization and user virtualization. They all work hand-in-hand.
With respect to app virtualization, MokaFive virtual layers is specifically recognizes XenApp streamed apps, App-V, ThinApp, and SVS packages. So when one of them is streamed, written to, or installed into Windows, the MokaFive layering engine realizes that this app came from a virtual package and ensures that everything that app writes is written into the app layer (since there's no need to pollute the user layer with a shared app that can be accessed again). This means that "rejuvenation" process can be simple and won't ruin any apps, and that back ups only have to be done at the user layer and really will include everything.
The same is true with user virtualization. At first you might wonder why you need a user virtualization product with MokaFive's layering. While there certainly is some overlap between the two products around how they isolate the user changes, the two products are fundamentally different. The user virtualization products, for instance, have full consoles that also allow you to control which settings are enforced on users, which they can change, which apps and group options users get, etc. The user virtualization products are also great for mixing-and-matching Windows XP, Windows 7, Session Host, 32- and 64-bit Windows, etc.
Is there an industry need for independent layering?
I guess we'll find out!
In MokaFive's view, there are actually two challenges to doing the whole desktop virtualization layering thing. One is the actual mechanical layering, and the other is doing the workflow to manage it all and get the layers where they need to be. And so this is where MokaFive comes in. They'll handle the layering. They'll do the rebootless domain join. They'll ensure that any user-installed apps persist between reboots. They have the extensive XML-based policy specification that defines how the layers work and are broken up.
But how do you create, provision, & deliver the three disks? That's where the workflow from somewhere else kicks in. (And of course, MokaFive would be happy to sell you their other product for that. But if you just want the layers on their own, now you can have them.)
When can we have it?
MokaFive virtual layers is available today for OEMs. A few of their larger customers are prototyping it. But so far they're not yet 100% sure how this thing will be released. Should they release this capability directly to customers? Or only via OEMs? Or...??
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