Case Study - Brigham Young University

Brigham Young University utilizes Runecast Analyzer to increase performance and mitigate outages risk

Overview

Brigham Young University-Idaho (BYU-Idaho) is a private, four-year university affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Guided by that affiliation, BYU-Idaho seeks to create a wholesome learning environment in which students can strengthen their commitment to their faith and receive a quality education that prepares them for leadership in the home, the community, and the workplace. Founded in 1888, BYU-Idaho has around 5,000 staff, with 32,000 on-campus students and 33,000 online students. Stephen Parker, Systems Engineer, is responsible for the University's VMware vSphere Environment that runs all the mission critical applications for BYU-Idaho.

Challenge

To ensure that all their vSphere hosts were operating at optimal performance, Mr. Parker needed a solution that would provide him visibility into what hosts needed patching or required configuration updates. Another challenge for Mr. Parker was not knowing which hosts required best practice procedures installed. Visiting VMworld – VMware's annual conference – Mr. Parker spent time in the solutions exchange seeking a resolution to his issues. “I looked at quite a few products while at VMworld but the Runecast Analyzer solution impressed me the most, in particular its ease of use,” stated Mr. Parker.

Solution

Runecast Analyzer is a proactive VMware vSphere management solution that deploys as an OVA format virtual appliance. Runecast Analyzer uses current VMware Knowledge Base articles and our expertise to analyze the virtual infrastructure and expose potential issues and best practice violations, before they cause major outages. Having selected Runecast Analyzer as his solution of choice, Mr. Parker immediately set about installing upon his return from VMworld. “Installation and set up was quick and simple and, in less than 5 minutes, we were receiving data back on our environment,” explained Mr. Parker. Commenting on the top 5 critical issues Runecast Analyzer has identified for BYU-Idhao, Mr. Parker said, “We found a few hosts that did not have the NTP client configured properly. Several hosts were accepting forged transmits. Several were accepting MAC address changes. Performance issues because of VM's using old NIC's or old drivers and Port groups missing redundant NICs all were identified by Runecast Analyzer.” Without the visibility provided by Runecast Analyzer, BYU-Idaho's environment risked potential huge outages from lack of redundancy if the main NIC failed or the path was lost (as there would have been no alternate path for the network traffic and services would become unreachable).

Benefits

Mr. Parker summarized the benefits that Runecast Analyzer has delivered to his organization in 3 key areas:

1. It is so easy to use, yet so powerful. I can quickly see which hosts are not compliant and have a checklist to begin solving the problems in our environment quickly and efficiently.

2. I have been able to find at least 3 major issues affecting almost every host in our environment. If we add the minor and best practices, we have identified and are working to prevent over 100 issues.

3. I am able to quickly see the issues on all the hosts instead of having to hunt down each host and manually checking it against all the issues I am aware of, then repeating the same thing tomorrow. Thus, Runecast Analyzer saves me hours, every day, tediously hunting for issues.

“Thanks to Runecast Analyzer I am saving 2-3 hours a day and it enables me to focus on more business critical aspects of running our environment.” Mr. Parker added. Mr. Parker summarized his thoughts for anyone running VMware vSphere, “Use Runecast Analyzer to help you stay compliant with all the never ending changes out there in our world. I would highly recommend this solution as a 'must have' for any VMware vSphere environment.”