Most enterprises run critical systems on VMware virtual infrastructure and have done for years. Advent One support many of these VMware environments, and continually audit and benchmark the environments against VMware best practices, Security and Compliance configuration as well as patch levels.
There are several challenges that VMware users may identify with:
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Which patches apply to which infrastructure stack?
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How do I eliminate bugs that can knock over my environment?
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Am I meeting the current VMware support matrix? Can I upgrade?
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Is my environment performing optimally and secure?
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Which KB patch is the right one?
What are VMware KB Articles?
The VMware Knowledge base is full of thousands of important articles that describes potential bugs, issues and other reported risks, describing best practices and how to resolve issues that may arise in a VMware environment. You can subscribe to the articles to receive regular updates. The problem with VMware KB articles is that there are thousands of them and staying on top of the articles able to keep track of them all and understand which ones apply to your environment is a time-consuming activity and sometimes impossible. For this reason, customers wait and hope that none of the reported bugs will hit their environment. More often than not, these bugs will become apparent and cause havoc causing performance degradations and system downtime sending IT operations teams into a state of reactive panic to restore the service- This is when these teams find out that they could of avoided had they applied the patch that the KB article offers.
Identify and Apply Best Practices
Best practice in IT is often conditional, as quite often “it depends”. It depends on your environment and the goals and operational requirements of your organisation. Best practice when it relates to VMware, is typically described in the form of aforementioned KB articles, however there are a number of other online sources of information that lead towards what configuration settings and architectural elements should be adopted. Generally speaking best practices are only recommendations but have been engineered by vendors, and in this case VMware to achieve better levels of performance and redundancy.
Security Compliance
We work with organisations in different industry verticals, many of which are regulated which requires certain security baselines and standards to applied. Examples of this PCI DSS and HIPAA. Being able to successfully apply and continually audit these security baselines can be a challenge.
Runecast Analyser
When one of our team was in VMworld in the US last year we came across Runecast. We subsequently met them locally in Sydney and got going running Runecast in our Managed Services environment. Runecast perfectly compliments the automated provisioning, monitoring and metrics we provide to VMware clients.
Runecast Analyser proactively identifies the causes of issues in VMware ( vSphere, vSAN, Horizon, AWS or NSX) environments to identify and prevent over 30,000+ known configuration issues (VMware Knowledgebase articles), Security risks and Best Practice violations before they occur, the software performs all the root cause analysis work for you as well as provides the solution to remediate – and it does it continuously!
Deployment takes 5 mins, is non-invasive and does not perform any changes to your environment, the quality of the insights that Runecast provides pertaining to security, operational excellence (or lack thereof) as well as being able to simulate VMware upgrades we found to be excellent and will save your team a significant amount of man hours. In addition to this, Runecast can benchmark your VMware environment against a chosen security baseline, and provide instructions to remediate the gaps that Runecast identifies. Allowing you to meet that upcoming security audit and ensure your virtual environment is configured as per the required security framework.
Advent One’s VMware SDDC service includes 24/7 monitoring, support, patching, automated provisioning and collection of metrics for analysis. As part of the service Advent One will help you:
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Gain real-time operational and security insights in your virtual environment
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Monitor, secure and troubleshoot your virtual infrastructures
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Identify areas for improvement and leverage proposed best practices to get the most out of your environment
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Provide a walkthrough of the findings and high-level recommendations
We recommend a 1-hour demo where we can show you how:
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You can automate the scanning of vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-V and Horizon View environments against constantly updated industry knowledge so latent issues and non-compliances can be proactively identified and remediated before problems occur. Identify critical risks, exposed KB articles in your environment in mins – something it normally takes an IT operations team months to achieve.
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You can achieve 100% security compliancy in your virtual environment against common security frameworks such as DISA STIG, NIST, CIS, PCI DSS and HIPAA
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Check your whole virtual environment against the VMware support matrix in seconds, and even simulated upgrades to target VMware versions – identifying what you need to update\upgrade before you perform the upgrade.
For more information, please contact www.adventone.com/contact