Part 1 – Deployment and Setup

Runecast Analyzer is a very useful tool to locate configuration issues within a vSphere cluster. It compares your installation against security hardening guides, best practices guides and the VMware Knowledge-Base (KB). Once you’ve set up your cluster everything might have been ok. Since then new issues might arise, problems get discovered and security guidelines can change. But your setup is still the same. It’s hard to read through VMware KB on a weekly or daily base. I would say it’s almost impossible. Some issues only occur in certain combinations of hardware, patch-level and firmware-level. That’s where Runecast kicks in. They check your setup against most recent information in the KB and hardening guides and present you a filtered subset of information with potential issues in your environment. So you can concentrate on fixing issues and don’t waste time in reading hundreds of new KB articles.

I’ve written a hands-on  introduction earlier this year. This time I’d like to focus on the product from an administrative point of view.

Licensing

Runecast offers a 15 day trial license without buying anything. But you’ll see only a limited subset of results.

As a vExpert there’s a special offer by Runecast. You’ll get a one year NFR license for up to 3 hosts without limitation. That’s the one I will use in the following sections. But even the 15 day trial will give a very good impression about the quality and usability of the product. Continue reading “Runecast Analyzer – Getting started Guide part 1”