Overview
Headquartered in Cheshire, UK, JSG provides textile rental and related services across the UK. They are the leading supplier of workwear and protective wear in the UK with over 40,000 customers, offering these services through the Apparelmaster brand. The Group also provides premium linen services for the hotel, catering and hospitality markets, and high volume hotel linen services through the Stalbridge, London Linen, Bourne and Afonwen brands.
Daniel Hunt is an IT Infrastructure Engineer at JSG and responsible for the company's VMware virtual infrastructure environment.
Challenge
As national market leaders in the textile services industry, JSG rely heavily on VMware for their in-house hosted infrastructure. Mr Hunt explained “It is of paramount importance we prevent any downtime within our organization.” Mr Hunt needed to be able to identify latent issues and potential future problems within their ESX environment to proactively reduce the risk of a major outage at JSG.
Solution
During VMworld Barcelona in 2017, Mr Hunt and his team visited the Runecast booth. “Runecast Analyzer was demonstrated to us and a technical representative explained the value it could bring JSG. We were extremely impressed with what we saw and heard.”
Runecast Analyzer is a patented proactive VMware vSphere management solution that installs as an OVA format virtual appliance. It combines the current VMware Knowledge Base articles and internal Runecast expertise to analyze the virtual infrastructure and expose potential issues and best practice violations before they cause major outages.
Upon his return from VMworld, Mr Hunt decided to trial Runecast Analyzer. “The deployment was extremely easy - we were up and running within 20 minutes.”
During the pilot phase, the number of potential hazards identified by Runecast Analyzer staggered Mr Hunt, “Five critical, 24 majors and 18 medium risks were identified on our first run!”
Benefits
“The ability to identify potential issues that could cause a major outage for the business, coupled with access to the automated compliance reports are the main benefits Runecast Analyzer delivers for JSG,” commented Mr Hunt.
The most critical issues Runecast Analyzer has identified so far at JSG are:
- ESXi Iost connectivity issues or PSOD
- Vulnerability issues in vCenter
- ESXi host fails with purple diagnostic screen
- Security compliance alerts
“Moving forward, Runecast Analyzer will help identify any security compliance and security issues before being implemented into our vCenter environment,” summarized Mr Hunt.