After just a couple of weeks with their new version 1.7.5 with the support for vSAN, Runecast Analyzer launched v1.8 with VMware NSX support.

The new Runecast Analyzer version support on VMware’s NSX-V is finally available. After a beta version launched a couple of weeks ago, now the final version is available to Runecast Analyzer customers.

Runecast Analyzer v1.8 will work with NSX-V like with vSphere, vCenter or vSAN, using current VMware Knowledge Base articles to analyze the NSX-V infrastructure.

What is new

The latest version of Runecast Analyzer automatically checks for thousands of configuration combinations which lead to known NSX problems. It will help you to avoid issues by telling you where vulnerabilities exist so you can resolve them before they actually happen. It will also rapidly accelerate troubleshooting when such problems occur.

• The Analyzer now detects NSX issues on VMware NSX-V versions 6.2 – 6.4.x
• Automated scan and evaluation of the NSX-V Best Practices violations.
• Automatic NSX-V VMware Security Hardening profile analysis and reporting
• NSX-V DISA-STIG profile analysis and reporting
• Automatic discovery of the NSX Managers linked to VMware vCenters
• Web-console performance improvements for bigger environments (dozens of ESXi hosts).
• vSphere web console Runecast plugin NSX update with a new issue summary widget.

With many companies using NSX-V in their systems, this is a very useful tool to analyze your NSX-V implementation and Best Practices. Not only in your NSX-V configurations but also security.

Note: This new Runecast Analyzer support is for VMware NSX-V, not VMware NSX-T. VMware NSX-T is a different product that runs independently from vCenter.

Runecast Analyzer with this new VMware’s NSX-V support is adding to their VMware support portfolio the main VMware Products with the latest versions.

• VMware vSphere 6.7
• VMware vCenter 6.7
• VMware vSAN 6.7
• VMware NSX-V 6.4.x

Check the next video how Runecast Analyzer works with NSX-V.

More information about this new release HERE.

Why analyze NSX?

VMware NSX is a network virtualization and security platform that provides the abstraction of network services from the underlying hardware. Functions like switching, routing, firewalling and load balancing are brought closer to the application and distributed across the environment.

Being a complex, software-defined VMware technology, NSX consists of many components that need to be configured, upgraded and maintained carefully over time.

VMware NSX and Runecast Analyzer integration brings complete automation using the VMware knowledge base, best practices, and security hardening profiles. It scans the following NSX components:

NSX Manager
Controller cluster
Distributed Firewall
Logical Switch
Distributed Router
NSX Edge

The connection to NSX, and subsequent analysis, result in a set of proactive steps designed to help you maintain a healthy and secure NSX setup.

How to update your Runecast Analyzer to v1.8? Please check our latest blog post regardingHow to update your Runecast Analyzer or if you are doing a new implementation of Runecast Analyzer, check my blog post How to configure Runecast.

The upgrade is available for existing Runecast customers under valid license. As always, there is free 14-days evaluation version of Runecast Analyzer with NSX-V support.

How to add Runecast Analyzer to your NSX-V

We have two options to connect Runecast Analyzer to your NSX.

First Option:

If you have your vCenter already added to Runecast Analyzer, you now need to add your NSX-V details to connect.

Login to your Runecast Analyzer and select Settings

In this section select the vCenter you want to add your NSX connection. Click Tab Actions and select Configure NSX.

In this example is the vCenter: 192.168.1.30

Next, add you NSX Server details and credentials, and then NSX Server is connected to your Runecast Analyzer.

Second Option:

If you add a new vCenter and also an NSX Server to your Runecast Analyzer.

Login to your Runecast Analyzer and select Settings

In this section, click button Add vCenter and add vCenter and NSX Server details.

Next, add NSX Server details and credentials.

Note: If NSX Server exists, Runecast Analyzer will automatically recognize an NSX Server in the above vCenter.

Next, your vCenter is added, and NSX Server is connected to your Runecast Analyzer.

In the next image, you can double check the added vCenter and also NSX Server. In this case, we also need to update Web Client Plugin.

After the above steps, we have our vCenter and NSX configured and connected to our Runecast Analyzer.

We can now login to our Runecast Analyzer and already check Runecast Analyzer recommendations for our NSX Server configurations.

Next blog post about Runecast Analyzer I will go through NSX and vSAN analysis and recommendations from Runecast Analyzer.

Hope this information can be useful.

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Note: This post was sponsored by Runecast