Runecast were the last company I had the pleasure of being a delegate for at the Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018.
I’ve written about Runecast on this blog before, and I really like who they are and what they do. Runecast is a proactive VMware management solution, delivered as a pre-packaged appliance, that aims to provide you with issue prevention, security compliance and log analytics for your VMware environment before any major outages occur.
The core intelligence engine within Runecast is primarily built on:
- VMware Knowledge Base articles
- Best Practices and Social Media
- Security Hardening guides
- DISA STIG
- PCI-DSS
To start off, Stan took us through an overview of Runecast and also covered off the recent release of Runecast 2.0, which includes features such as:
- New User Interface
- Historical Data Reports
- PCI-DSS Compliance Profiles
- Updated Appliance
Runecast were also the first to release a third-party NSX custom widget which is great to see. There’s one thing you’ll learn about Runecast, and that is they are quick to develop and quick to release easy to consume information for critical issues, such as the Spectre, Meltdown and L1TF vulnerabilities seen so far this year.
Stan took us through a “chalk talk” where he used the whiteboard to articulate and explain the Runecast system. If you are new to Runecast, spending 11 minutes to see Stan explain it all here is well worth your time.
Aylin picked up the laptop to run us all through a live demo. This was the first time I have seen the new interface released in 2.0 (I’ve bee slack in the lab and haven’t updated yet), but I was really impressed. I didn’t think the old interface was bad by any means, but I really like the colours, layout and visual indicators Runecast are using in version 2.0 of their product.
The demo was very thorough, I believe we covered pretty much every aspect of the UI in one way or another.
Even though I knew the product reasonably well, I did learn a few new things and I was really impressed with the presentation from Stan and Aylin. They were able to answer all questions from delegates on the spot and in my opinion, they had great answers for every question. If you haven’t already, when you finish reading this blog post, go ahead and sign up for a trial of Runecast and drop it in your environment. I guarantee you will be impressed with the simplicity to set up, speed at which it scans your environment and the verbose amount of information you will receive from Runecast. Having worked for a managed services provider on an off over the last 10 years, I truly believe Runecast is a critical tool to have in your toolbag for VMware environments.
Check out the Runecast presentation in the embedded videos above. What do you think about Runecast? Let me know in the comments below.