vUM

I have been testing out Runecast Analyzer ↗ in my lab recently - it’s pretty badass, you can set it up to scan your virtual infrastructure at a vCenter level and will scan your vC, VMs and hosts looking for KBs that may apply, security compliance and best practises. As you can see my lab isn’t exactly a model config when it comes to any of these things: It’s really very cool, syslogging is also built in, if you add it as a syslog target to your hosts (RCA can do this automatically too) it will monitor the syslogs incoming and search the KB database for any matching problems - I actually found that some of my iSCSI paths weren’t coming up after failover due to this!...

If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab. I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware; it’s cheap on eBay, I like their management tools and in the past i’ve only really had good experiences with them, granted it’s no Cisco UCS, HP Bladesystem or Dell M1000e - I think with the addition of OpenManage, and in particular OMIVV it makes it almost as manageable as those environments when you get the foundations laid down nice and solid....