vRetreat 2nd September 2020

It was a great opportunity to be invited back for another vRetreat and this time I wanted to try and stay straight on top of this can get a blog out ASAP

To start the day we had the all awesome Kev from Runecast showing of their wares

So what is Runecast… In its most simple form its a super clever AI monster that sits in the cloud monitoring KB’s, Best Practises and even Social media. Also go them they have recently had their patent all approve and hanging on their wall proudly

One great new bit of functionality I learnt this time round was the fact they can easily update even on a black-site so the appliance is not reliant on the internet and update ‘offline’. So this no longer is an issue if even your own security means things like this despite being a security tool can not access the web.

An interesting fact that you may not know is over 90% of issues can be prevented and Runecast to the rescue, it essentially removes those hours of using a well know search engine and getting things back online

As we all know logs a great but there is always so many to try and get through the nice thing here is the product can goobble them all up and we can easily remidate against them

At this points as many of us are techies the slides were put to one side and its was demo time!

Straight off the bad the graphs are super insightful and we can easily see changes within the environment

The great thing is you can even see when you think you are fixing thing what else you may have broken in the process

Planning your next upgrade? Well you may have well seen this if you missed something in the HCLs..

As you know the HCL is your bible when it comes to compatibility and support. Checking this is fine if you have the same server across your estate but let be fair usually you have even more than subtype or at least generation. This can get tricky trying to tick all this off and check it before the goal posts move again.

I really like how their tool just very simply shows you what works and what doesnt and even what levels of firmware you need to be on

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Also the upgrade simulation is nice and you can quickly plan for large or incremental upgrades and see what hardware may need replacing or at least what vendor patches/firmware to apply to the hardware

Also they like to cater for us coding guys with an nice API!

Kev then looped back round to where all this started and came from… the core of the appliance SECURITY!

As many know my view of this security is like onions… it usually makes you cry as its it can just get complex with all the layers. Usually its missing something and that causes the issue. Out of the box there is a great set of standards with even PCI DSS and CIS.

Now this is where it also got exciting it CIS also extended to AWS! This again all been provided by the same appliance and you can set the levels easily

Its a simple click to then even compare the same standard in VMware

Its nice even just to see the simple things you can do to enhance your security posture

They even have a nice little vRealize plugin that means you can easily secure/remediate a host quickly!

This can easily be applied across hosts and their relevant networking components.

Still want a good sell to your business or boss… go get a demo and use this slide below!

Also here is a few other key takeaways, I still love the fact data does not leave your environment and its now leveraging clouds

Have a PureStorage array? Well they can soon even check best practises there and more vendors coming in the future

Still excited? Head over to runecast.com and get your free 14 day trial up and going today!

Next up we had James from 10Zig, if you ever want to get in his good books an Espresso Martini will go a long way 🙂

A really great slide to see us off is below showing how many like us are going through a digital transformation is a very rapid time

James was kind enough to then cover who he has seen accelerate in the industry. He has seen many VDI POC suddenly move even as far as back as 2009. This with many people in a business asking why change it, why do we need to be in the cloud and VDI and this is where many had no choice and the red tape is removed to let the VDI flourish.

What is interesting to see what was being shipping during the Gold dust period in March, considering everyone was buying laptops there was only a 2% growth

So what is great about a laptop vs VDI? Well you can remote work, when presenting and even when mobile like on the train but not everyone needs this. How do you manage these when people are not in the office, are there any health and safety issues using this at home or does frustration with the use drive people to use the own. Even more how do you stop users installing stuff on there or other members in the house using as it may be the only device.

10ZiG have devices that support pretty much every desktop vendor be Citrix, RDP, AWS Workspaces and they even support new communication methods such as Zoom etc

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It was really interteting to see the split of use of their clients in EMEA for the difference systems

Much of this is all down to what the end user is doing and what devices or peripheral are using to interact with their desktop. Its all mainly down to USB support or redirection, this of course has an impact on the user experience.C

So what is NOS, essentially is a locked down version of Linux that exposes the required client to the user to make it easy and automated to the end user and support staff

Also updates are quick for things like Citrix as its easy to embed into their OS

So what happens if you have old clients you want to try and stretch a little further.. well thats where RepurpOS comes in

Want to give it a go? Your machines will need the below specs

So you want to manage all the things… and remotely!

Simply with the manager you can and its free!

So how hard is it? Install the manager, set up a group, ideally pop in your DNS SRV record (guide here), plug it in, turn it on and get started on your desktop!

There is also some nice new features so you can have different levels for support even with a bidirectional SSL tunnel of 443 with the devices.

Want to try and win some prizes and have some fun? Join the fantasy Premier League below!

As usual before making any buying decisions bear in mind that this article is based on a sales discussion at a sponsored event rather than me performing aPOC or production installation. I did not receive any funds to write this article or offered any payment in anyway, although the vendors did sponsor a prize draw for delegates at the event. I hope I can follow up the events with POCs with more in depth articles and I am sure any of the presenters would be happy to follow up with buying discussions