Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 87 vetted SolarWinds Virtualization Manager reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 43)
December 20, 2019
Current version isn't what it used to be!
Before I get started, you should know that I'm intentionally running v7.1, and all answers to this survey will be referring to that version. That's because future versions DO NOT deliver the information in the same way and the product has lost much of its value as a result. Support was NOT helpful in finding a solution or getting their "new" product to behave the same way. That said, to answer your question, I'm the only person in the company who uses VMAN daily, or at all, really. It gives me a "coffee-cup-view" each morning of how our hosts and VMs have been performing (Memory, CPU, IOPS, Network) and it is one of the first places I check when I get calls about performance.
- Up through v7.1, a quick view of server (host and VM) performance and trends.
- Through v7.1, it was everything we needed. Since then, the graphs that would harvest performance figures (network, memory, CPU, IOPS), would never display the same way, and would not refresh with the frequency to make the data digestible.
November 17, 2019
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Review
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is being used by the VMware team. It addresses the problem of not being able to easily see the health of the VMware environment. It gives the engineers the ability to see everything on a single pane of glass. You can see which VMs need more memory/resources and which have too much, in which resources can be reclaimed.
- Single pane of glass
- To be able to see VMware health/predictions of what is coming down the pike
- Recommendations to improve the virtual environment
- Sometimes there are glitches when updating the software
- Free training videos
We use it to monitor all the network devices in our organization. It is used by IT and some other business units to monitor their critical devices. IT has been a great help for us in checking the bandwidth utilization and health of network devices in our environment.
- Network management.
- Monitor wifi devices.
- Sometimes when we upgrade the software we lose device access and have to restart it.
- Wish there was more training.
February 11, 2020
SolarWinds is a great tool for monitoring software
We are using SolarWinds for server monitoring and alerts.
- Detail performance stats.
- Good alert system.
- RAM management poor.
- Capacity planning could be wider, not server specific.
October 09, 2019
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
We had a member of the team on long term medical leave and we needed something that could help other members of the team monitor the VMWare infrastructure. This was the best option that we could afford. We found it fairly easy to configure and we tied it into the rest of our SolarWinds environment.
- Overall view of hosts, VMs and Storage
- Monitoring
- Multi platform
- It can be a little slow
- Alerts could be more comprehensive
July 01, 2019
Trying to wrangle your private cloud environment? Never send a child to do the work of a VMAN!
Building a consolidated view of the infrastructure that supports your virtualized environment is hard. App owners blame the OS. The OS admins blame the DBAs. The DBAs always blame storage. Everyone blames the network team. And, when all else fails, they blame virtualization. VMAN stitches together a consolidated view of your environment and let's you do it without investing in additional tools from VMware. Using the SolarWinds Orion authentication, you can even give non-admin users views and access to your environment through a single interface.
- Beautiful inventory of the guests and hosts running in a cluster, and how they are organized in your environment
- Own other SolarWinds modules like SRM, APM, etc? AppStack puts everything in a single, lineage view.
- Automates tasks for non-admins and/or run teams -- vMotion? Yep. Shutdown a VM? Sure.
- Latest version integrates beautifully with Orion. No more running virtual appliances. Everything is built on the Orion framework!
- Want to build alert? The Orion alerting engine is easy to use, intuitive, and supports SQL, SWQL, and drag/drop alert logic definition.
- VMware is the platform that gets top billing. HyperV is supported, but is a 2nd class citizen
- We encountered duplicate instances of VMware hosts. It was a pain to clean up
- Credential manager hasn't been updated since -- forever. Investigating authentication issues/managed host issues is an exercise in futility.
Virtualization Manager is being used by the IT department to manage and monitor our relatively large, global VMware environment. We have issues with virtual machines being over provisoned, snapshots not consolidated or removed, VMware tools not kept up to date, hardware issues with ESXi hosts. Virtualization Manager was purchased after a successful POC to cover the entire estate and reduce the aforementioned problems.
- The volume of data available from Virtualization Manager out of the box is huge. We were shocked at the amount of issues we had that Virtualization Manager highlighted within the first few days.
- The ability to add additional widgets into seperate screens giving valuable VM and host insight.
- The recommending/reporting element is fantastic and we use it daily to keep track of whats changing in our VM environment.
- We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.
November 16, 2018
Essential for a solid Virtual environment
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is used by the IT systems engineer. This tool enabled us to monitor all the virtual servers in the environment. It works across different platforms like VMware and Hyper-V. The system helped to detect virtual server problems before they occur and perform proactive maintenance. SolarWinds VMAN has advanced reporting capabilities and a customizable dashboard. We used this application to forecast the virtual environment growth and accordingly estimate annual budget.
- I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
- I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
- Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
- Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.
- Generating a new license key upon renewal and then installing the new key is not a straightforward process. I think license renewal should be handled using easier methods
- Solarwinds VMAN is a VM itself, so in case the cluster or ESX/host where it resides fails, there won't be a way to get alerted.
- There account managers are really annoying, every year they start calling and sending emails 3 month before renewal.
October 19, 2018
SolarWinds VMAN Review - A service provider perspective.
As the Founder of Silverback Systems Services Ltd, an IT consultancy specialising in providing professional services to both end users and resellers of SolarWinds products, I find myself working with many different businesses who have a need to monitor their virtualisation infrastructure. Virtualisation Manager, or VMAN for short, is the best-in-class, vendor agnostic, tool which does that job in spades. Whether an organisation uses VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or a combination of both, VMAN provides all the details an organisation could want on their hypervisor estate. When integrated with other Orion modules, such as Server and Application Manager (SAM) and Network Performance Monitor (NPM), you get visibility across the whole estate, using Orion's AppStack™ environment views. In my experience, once a business takes up an evaluation of VMAN, they quickly find it a key part of their infrastructure team's toolset.
- VMAN's powerful sprawl analyses allows businesses to see where their hypervisor estate can be made more efficient. Coupled with powerful capacity management, the efficiency gains allow the product to quickly start returning on it's investment, allowing businesses to do more with what they already have.
- The recommendations provided by VNMAN allows administrators to schedule changes in compute, storage assignment, and host/guest balance. These changes can be automated to take place on a schedule to suit, with VMAN making the changes at the appropriate time, allowing businesses to potentially save on expensive out of hours administration.
- It's not only on-premise! With VMAN you can monitor your cloud-based guests on Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.
- Whilst VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V are the two big hitters in the hypervisor estate, VMAN lacks support for other popular solutions, such as Citrix XenServer, Oracle VM.
October 09, 2018
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager helps buisness go forward
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is used by the enterprise IT [department] to manage the VMWare environment daily. It gives deep insight beyond what vSphere can and also ties back to storage and hardware giving me a single pane of glass view.
- Recommendations. Those are wonderful. You build out your environment based on a set of criteria from a vendor or others, only to find your resources are poorly used. The VMAN product allows you to make adjustments based on its recommendations and it automates the process for you.
- Pinpoints guests with problems. It provides a graphical and then drills down details to the virtual guests with issues you need to address immediately.
- Capacity planning and sprawl. VMAN gives you all the tools you need to prvent sprawl and plan for the future.
- Licensing. One of the most glaring elements to SolarWinds is the way they license. I feel they could improve this a bit. It a easy process just costly.
- They tell you about orphaned VMDK but don't tell you where it might be used. It says it might be, I feel it should check.
October 26, 2018
Can handle it in a single glass pane
It is great to have auto-monitoring from SolarWind's virtualization tool. We use this tool in our department. It is great if we want quick and fast results and solutions. It provides an accurate status of the system. I also like the way it can be used for monitoring troubleshooting and optimising; it's very simple to use. We use it for cleaning up data.
- It provides information alerts and allows us to have the accurate status of the system.
- Helps in problem solving before anything serious can arise.
- Increases the uptime by optimising the provisions of the resources.
- Simple to install and easy to use.
- Gives graphical presentation by showing where the problem is shown.
- It's a bit expensive.
- A license is hard to get.
- Better if it could be allowed to have a lot more automation.
October 19, 2018
SVM customisation and API benefits
We are using SVM to monitor our networking devices from their hardware utilization to monitoring business networks critical links, syslog messages, netflow and performace as a whole. Currently SolarWinds is being used by our IT department which has different roles within. The entire platform has been separated for two types of users: Service desk and Infrastructure team.
Service desk is able to monitor all our devices and would be alerted in a prompt manner if any issues would appear. This is very useful for escalation process within the business in scenarios where critical business services are down. They are restricted to certain uses of the platform though.
Infrastructure team is administrating all of the devices added to the platform, we are actively using SolarWinds API for our internal processes which are expanding rapidly with the ease use of the API.
Service desk is able to monitor all our devices and would be alerted in a prompt manner if any issues would appear. This is very useful for escalation process within the business in scenarios where critical business services are down. They are restricted to certain uses of the platform though.
Infrastructure team is administrating all of the devices added to the platform, we are actively using SolarWinds API for our internal processes which are expanding rapidly with the ease use of the API.
- API intergration. Ease to integrate SolarWinds API to internal processes.
- Syslog alerts are clear and easily read.
- Ease to add Cisco devices to SVM.
- Customisation choices.
- SVM can be slow at times, e.g to view 2000 syslog messages of a device might take up to 30s to load.
- Poor integration of Meraki devices and wireless data output in general.
We use SolarWinds in our IT department to manage our virtual server deployment it helps us with predictions on growth. It also helps us optimize our VMs in our virtual environment across all of our hosts. It also will let us know if there is unused CPU and RAM on specific VMs so we can take resources and apply those to other systems.
- Recommends migration of VMs across hosts to even out workload
- Alerts us on unused resources and suggests what can be taken away from which systems
- Predicts growth so you can plan for expansion
- some times we get false reports of Zombie VMs but that is not often at all
October 15, 2018
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager- saves time and money
We have a small group of systems administrators who use VMAN to send email notifications when problems arise with our VMWare Vcenter systems, as well as a quick dashboard that is always displayed giving us a list of potential problems in real-time.
- Customizable dashboard, giving you only the information you want to see (of course, it's only as useful as the time you put into configuring it.)
- Customizable email notifications (once again- you have to know what you want to report on, and specify that explicitly.)
- It also provides capacity management, but this has never been an issue for us, so I haven't really utilized this feature.
- I would like to see a little more intelligence built into the application. More out of the box reports, notifications and displays that are useful without needing built by the customer. It seems that most Sys Admins are all looking for the same information and notifications- why not have a few build a very useful dashboard, and have that be the default- and then still allow for further customization?
SolarWinds is our go to platform for monitoring all live/dev and test systems. VM is a critical tool in keeping tabs on performance and planning
- Optimisation of resources used
- Forward capacity planning
- Problem resolution
- Improved graphical displays
- Analyses of groups of servers
January 29, 2019
Look forward to using long term
This is vital to our full stack monitoring solution. Spanning global datacentres and branch offices SW VM provides full coverage of our virtual estate. It's main benefit is resource both in human and technical sense. As an engineer allowing me to diagnose and resolve outages in a significantly quicker timeframe. Benefitting both end users for internal systems but also our customers.
Its in depth coverage also allows us to identify wasteful resources and maximise our efficiency bringing real savings to infrastructure on premise costs.
Its in depth coverage also allows us to identify wasteful resources and maximise our efficiency bringing real savings to infrastructure on premise costs.
- In depth VM and Host coverage, particularly metrics such as CPU ready time, no more calculations working out % based on ms latency - its all available at glance of a chart.
- Coverage of both SAN and VM environments compliments eachother really well allowing us to diagnose any bottle necks within 15 minutes compared to an hour prior to using SW VM.
- Custom dashboards allows all our engineers to customise their NOC views allowing the umbrella departments to quicker respond or be able to proactively work with other departments to avoid downtime.
- AWS coverage, not had major chance to research but seems to lack native compatibility for AWS specific services - such as ECS / Cloudfront metrics etc.
- Some container technologies such as Docker, again not had much time to research but upon first investigations doesn't seem as native to implement monitoring compared to say VMware.
- AD deep dive monitoring - replication times etc.
October 19, 2018
Solarwinds VMAN, doing the job no other module can
I use VMAN to monitor VMware and Hyper-V managed services environments for a number of companies. It allows for a great breadth of visibility across all of our virtual hosts that no other module of SolarWinds allows. It is an integral and fundamental part of the monitoring solution that our clients purchase.
- Capacity planning in storage.
- Recommendations to improve environments.
- Separate VMWare and Hyper V specific tools.
We are using Solarwinds VMan to monitor our entire virtualisation estate including Hyper-V and VMware.
We use it to address estate capacity, load balancing, alerting and troubleshooting.
- Capacity planning is excellent for planning ahead for new projects and future expansion.
- Finding bottlenecks within the estate and quickly rectifying lack of CPU, RAM and storage.
- Virtualisation recommendations is particularly good for load balancing resources across the estate.
October 12, 2018
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager has it's Pros and Cons
We're using the product for a consolidated view of our VMware and Hyper-V environments in the UK. We integrate VMAN into our current Orion solution for detailed information on our servers and storage. We also make use of out of the box alerts and recommendations to maintain the platforms.
- Detailed server / storage information and performance statistics.
- Alerts.
- Recommendations, particularly on right sizing.
- Single pane of glass for virtualized environments.
- Dashboard widgets - Sorting lists by column headings is not available in all views.
- Hyper-V needs more attention in general. But being able to group servers by Clouds, Host Groups, Replication status, Mainenence mode, host status etc. need to be added.
- Capacity management could do with the ability to report on entire enviroment and not just a single cluster.
- Hyper-V Recommendations – Memory – There should be a clear distinction between static and dynamic RAM. And actions should not mention or perform reboot if dynamic and not required.
October 11, 2018
Another excellent offering from SolarWinds!
VMan is being used within our department to monitor and manage the multiple virtual environments that we have. It is an easy way to see what the health of the environment is, and if there are any potential issues arising which need attention.
- Easy to setup - you just need to give it credentials in order to discover your environment, and has many pre-programmed views which give you granular detail
- Intuitive - fairly easy to play with and understand everything, however when needed there is very good documentation and support
- Automation - you can set VMan to increase/decrease resources to VMs, based on their historical workload, and also move them to different hosts based on alerts from the rest of the Orion suite
- Cost - it is fairly expensive, but has more features than comparable products
- Cloud Support - would be nice to have the same granularity with Azure/AWS based VMs
It is used to monitor our Vmware environment. It gives a clear view of the overall status of our 350+ virtualized servers allow us to see when we need to add more capacity of CPU, storage or IO.
- It helps us determine where problems are and helps us determine what is a good cloud candidate.
- Better performance.
October 11, 2018
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager: great addition to already great monitoring software
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is being used as a monitoring platform for our VMware infrastructure.
It's used for real time monitoring, as well as a historical and alerting platform.
It's used for real time monitoring, as well as a historical and alerting platform.
- Management of VM Assets
- Potential Virtualization Issues
- Virtualization Alerts
- More dynamic layout of dashboards and greater customization.
- More detailed reports
- More at glance dashboards
September 28, 2018
Great starting tool but not not the best for automation
We currently use Virtualization Manager for maintenance and some basic levels of automation. On the maintenance side we use it to clean up old snapshots and send Slack notifications to our channels of impending removal. We just implemented checks for the VMs in vCenter, specifically our DHCP servers, and it will automatically reboot the VM if it detects issues. This also sends Slack notifications and escalates before paging our IT team if the simple reboot doesn't fix the issue.
- Snapshot Management - It was extremely easy to implement and set up this piece, it is nice to have an automated tool for cleaning up snapshots because this is often forgotten in the day to day.
- Basic Automation - it has the capability to restart VMs or make additional changes automatically on the fly, although we have only just started using this piece I see potential in its future use.
- Easy integration - Was very easy to setup, the service account gets access to vcenter and then you login, it only takes a few minutes without a lot of in depth knowledge of either platform.
- Application Monitoring with Virtualization Manager - It isn't very simple to implement a specific application and tie it to a multitude of servers, you can set it up on a one to one basis but you would have to do it individually per vm.
- Virtualization Manager & Nodes - Nodes and VMs are treated differently in Solarwinds, even if you add a VM as a node, while it gives you different options for each, there is not a lot of cross over and we find that even when muting VMs/Nodes alerts still go through or get triggered
- Weird Objects - there are some random objects that have appeared over time in our virtualization manager page, hosts, vms, that don't exist. There doesn't seem to be an easy way of removing them and I dont know where they came from. It is more of an annoyance than an actual issue but it flags false positives
We are using Virtualization Manager to get a complete view of our virtualized environment, VMware and HyperV in a single pane. Its use is focused in out IT infrastructure area. One benefit is the integration with other SolarWinds products such as Server Application Monitoring (SAM). This allows us to monitor the entire virtualization structure from performance at the guest level and how it impacts hosts performance.
- Integration with VMware Virtual Center and Hypervisor hosts. Since we have a mixed virtual infrastructure VMan allows the administrators to quickly identify potential issues and conflicts across our virtual environment, without relying on separate tools for each technology.
- The integration with other Solarwinds products allows for the ability to drill down into the other modules for a clearer view of detail associated with a process or event.
- There were some issues migrating from the previous version to the latest version. Screen displays didn't always function as expected.
- Due to licensing constraints, the ability to easily filter which devices to monitor and which to skip over in order to stay within the license limits.
- The ability to set thresholds based on the guest or host's role in the virtualized environment. Databases might have a different threshold requirement than web servers.
September 26, 2018
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager - Good to GO - Go NOW!
We utilize SolarWinds Virtualization Manager on a daily basis to monitor 2 sites, 3 Clusters. I utilize virtualization manager along with other tools to ensure that we are proactive rather than reactive. The main dashboard is displayed on a wall monitor to ensure that the team has full visibility to the environment.
The tool tells you if you have VM ware tools out of day, attached media to the virtual machine, data store over allocation, host running low on disk space, VMs rebooted, VM Phantom Snapshot Files, ... the list goes on and on. You have great visibility into resource allocation across the whole environment. CPU Utilization, CPU Ready, Memory Utilization, Data store I/O latency. I can't appreciate this tool enough; you get more out of this tool simply by asking Virtualization manager to discover your environment.
- Set up and installation is unbelievably easy. Integration to Orion can be done with a point and a click after you have VM up and running.
- Details across the environment are so very valuable ; they are color coded as to the severity of attention necessary to resolve any issue.
- Capacity Planning is a must during budget processing and when users come to ask for additional resources to run an unplanned application.
- I would love the ability to acknowledge that an image of a machine does not require VM Ware tools, therefore it should not trigger a condition to load the tools. We have images of servers and computers used to spin up machines; vm ware tools is loaded after the server or computer is provisioned for production.
- When integrated with Orion, I would love not to loose my place in Virtualization Manager when I add additional resources to a resource map. Each time I add a resource to the map, I have to add what was previously there ... this is only when you integrate with Orion. Stand Alone, you can add, edit, delete resources to show on a map.
- I am having a hard time coming up with additional room for improvement, as I do need to upgrade my current version when time permits. This is such a valuable tool that is used every day, multiple times a day!
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Scorecard Summary
About SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an intuitive tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization.
Complete visibility
into your environment
Manage both VMware and Microsoft environments - on-premises or in the cloud - with a single tool. VMAN also visualizes how your virtualization connects to application, server, and storage infrastructure for faster troubleshooting.
Clear path to maximize performance
Get insight into the performance, capacity, configuration, and usage of your virtualized infrastructure, including hosts, VMs, clusters and datastores. VMAN delivers recommendations to address active or potential performance issues.
Address virtualization issues efficiently
VMAN can execute a variety of management actions, including power on/off, suspend, reboot a VM, or take and delete snapshots. You can migrate VMs to a different host, and VM disks to a different data store.
Reclaim resources for improved performance
Reclaim virtual resources instantly with VM sprawl alerts and recommendations. VMAN can automatically find idle, stale, and zombie VMs as well as orphaned VMDKs to free up storage space. VMAN can guide you in right-sizing your VMs to recapture CPU and memory resources for further savings.
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Screenshots
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Video
View an overview of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and some of its key features including dashboards, alerts, performance monitoring, capacity planning, and VM sprawl.
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Downloadables
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Integrations
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Competitors
Dynatrace, Nutanix AOS, Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo), VMware vROps
Pricing
- Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?No
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Support Options
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | ||
| Forum/Community | ||
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
| Video Tutorials / Webinar |
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows |
| Mobile Application: | No |