Last month came the moment that most desktop admins dread: the release of a new Windows service pack. Service packs are multi-gigabyte behemoths that routinely fail to install, break applications, and generally tick off users everywhere.
This morning, our IT guy pushed out SP1 to our company using the standard MokaFive update process. To pace the deployment for bandwidth reasons and to make sure everything is going smoothly, he broke the rollout into chunks of users. He targeted the new version to an AD group that contained a bunch of users, including me:
For me, as an end user, the 1.8 GB update silently and gradually downloaded in the background. I didn’t even know it was happening. When it was fully downloaded, a little flag popped up in my virtual desktop informing me that I had an update:
A new world
I clicked the note and let MokaFive perform a shutdown to accept the update. Once the virtual desktop is off, the update itself took literally 2 seconds. Maybe less, I wasn’t really timing it.
How is this done? MokaFive updates are delivered as a compressed disk-level differentials. When a virtual desktop with an update is shutdown, MokaFive simply moves a pointer to the blocks of the new version, performs a quick validation, and it’s ready to go.
Sure enough, I pushed the “play” button to start my desktop, and I was up and running again. Because my new desktop is a bit-accurate copy of the golden image that IT tested, it worked flawlessly.
Wow, this really is a new world. A nearly 2 GB service pack update that completes super fast, and is as smooth as any other update.
And get this: you can roll it back!
If something does go wrong, our IT guy can roll back to the last good version, which of course comes down as another bit-accurate “update”.
I think we’re going to like this new world.
- Burt Toma, Director of Products
