Earlier this week, Runecast released into General Availability version 2.0 of their vSphere analyser platform. I’ve been a keen follower of the progress of Runecast since their inception a couple of years ago. There was a space in the market to be filled and they have been able to improve in the initial release by releasing new functionality often. It wasn’t that long ago that they added vSAN support…and more recently NSX support.
This release brings the following new functionalities:
- Ability to store and display all detected and resolved issues over time for every connected vCenter.
- The completely new monitoring dashboard with The Most Affected hosts and trending.
- Automation of PCI-DSS VMware rules and new PCI-DSS profile UI
- Support for vSphere 6.7 HTML5 plugin
- Usability, performance and security improvements for increased ease of use.
- Latest VMware Knowledge Base updates.
First thing to notice in the new release is the new Dashboard that has been improved and for mine is now more logically laid out. But for me the biggest feature added in this release is the enhancement to Historical Trending and a new analysis function. As someone who spent a time managing and operating vSphere platforms over the years, the ability to see trends is crucial in troubleshooting.
Historical Analysis is new in version 2.0 and aims to help isolate the root cause of a reported incident as fast as possible and detect new problems caused by product update or configuration changes. 2.0 will store at least 3 months worth of vCenter, vSAN and NSX-V scan results, including issue description. This provides trending information on the dashboard.
The introduction of PCI-DSS checks is something that will assist in compliancy situations. As someone who has had the pain of going through compliancy, any tool that makes the process easier is welcomed.
Im looking forward to meeting up with the guys at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas next week and I would recommend and vSphere admin to take a look at Runecast!
You can download Runecase 2.0 from here and take it for a spin: https://runecast.biz/profile
