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Runecast is a company that provides actionable predictive analytics for VMware vSphere environments. Runecast Analyzer is a solution that provides software-defined expertise to mitigate service outages, increase security and compliance and reduce time in troubleshooting.  Runecast Analyzer is deployed in VMware environments across the globe within enterprise and SME customers.

This solution can discover hidden issues in your vSphere environment by using the current VMware Knowledge Base articles, that is probably the most trusted, complete and up-to-date public source of known issues and best practices related to VMware products, but it’s also typically used reactively, once the problem already persists.

The product (and the company) has been build by some VMware experts to fill an existing gap between a deployment and a good deployment.

During those years the product has grown faster by adding new features and monitoring not only vSphere environments, but also vSAN (with Runecast Analyzer v1.7) and NSX (with Runecast Analyzer v1.8).

Now they have announced the new v2.0, one important milestone for their product.

This release brings 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.

What sound really interesting is the way to use this tool as a “change version” system (limited to its results): a VMware admin can click on Compare with Previous results, Runecast Analyzer shows a comparison summary between selected and previous scan, as shown below:

And the PCI-DSS capability it’s also very interesting, because a VMware administrator can enable automatic PCI-DSS rule check against their VMware setups and fix detected standard violations. Although Runecast Analyzer cannot guarantee full compliance even when all PCI-DSS checks pass, it will greatly speed up the PCI-DSS implementation and together with historical trending functionality, it will provide continuous monitoring against PCI-DSS violation on VMware.

To enable PCI-DSS in Runecast Analyzer:

  1. In Settings, enable PCI-DSS profile
  2. Select one or all vCenters and click Analyze button
  3. Go to Security hardening menu and click PCI-DSS

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-20 and vExpert Pro. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-19. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.