TrustRadius
SolarWindsEssential for a solid Virtual environment2018-11-16T20:11:25.977ZSolarWinds 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.,9,The uptime has been improved since we are detecting issues proactively
The budget estimate for upgrades are more accurate
Executive reports are more meaningful,Most of the common issues with VMs are RAM overload, not enough processing power, or virtual disk full. These minor issues can hardly be detected by checking on every virtual server OS. With SolarWinds VMAN these issues are detected and shown on the dashboard. With custom alerts on certain thresholds, emails or text messages will be sent out to control the issue before the service/application goes down.,Capacity planner has been a very useful tool to estimate growth and budget. For instance, when we knew about upcoming projects and estimated the number and size of VMs required, we use this info as an input to the capacity planner. The output was the upgrades in terms of memory, processing and storage required. What-if scenarios are used and the outputs are used by technical team and management to make the best decision on the what projects to select, what projects to drop and what budget is required for VM infrastructure upgrades.,As a system Engineer, I used to customize the dashboard to view red flagged VMs and attend to the issues proactively.
This capability has increase the uptime of applications and services running on the virtual servers. Monitoring in almost real time a very large number of vms is only possible through such an efficient and flexible dashboard and it resulted in increased uptime for business critical services.,Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure, VMware Horizon (formerly VMware View) and Odin Virtuozzo,Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SQL Server, VMware vCenter ServerTimothy SawahVMAN is the Man2018-10-15T13:42:19.686ZVirtualization 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.,8,We have certainly stopped some outages, particulary where delta files from abandoned VMs have been left to grow. In the past this would have caused an outage with the VM going offline.
We have reduced resources being consumed by using the over provisoning reporting.,We have regained control of our extensive VM environment, we're spotting host and VM issues far quicker than we ever have done in the past. We can manage VMs direct through the Orion console too, which gives a quick turn around if an issue needs addressing.,We have used capacity planning scenarios against several of our production hosts to gauge how long the current resource will last. We have some expansions coming up in our production environment and VMAN has been fantastic in giving us an insight into just how much of a resource will be needed based on the current configuration and inventory.,We're yet to use this feature in full, it would be unfair to give a positive or negative reflection until we have used the product.,Veeam ONE,SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds IPAM, SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, Solarwinds Database Performance Analyzer for SQL Server,30,12,Gaining visibility of how our ESXi hosts and Clusters behave.
Visibility of VM issues, such as bad out of date VMware tools, snapshots , storage issues.
Over provisioning of VM resources and being able to claw back said resources.
Reporting and recommendations on future expansions in our ESXi environments.,We were unaware of just how much over provisioning was happening with VMs which VMAN highlighed in the first few days.,We intend on using VMAN to predict future expansions using the reporting elements.,10,Yes,Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation
Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Analyst Reports
Third-party Reviews,We reviewed multiple vendors before making a decision, and we also went through several proof of concepts. There isnt alot we would change as we believe we selected the correct solution for our requirements and everyone has been very impressed when using the platform.,Implemented in-house,Yes,Change management was minimal,We had issues polling some of our vCenters and ESXi hosts, in particular the hardware elements of the chassis, we discovered this was due to a proxy issue in the end, in our environment. However it meant hardware monitoring was unavailable.,9,Self-taught,Yes, very easy to learn without training, especially for engineers with key skills in VMware and Storage. If the latter is missing, then on boarding training and training classes would be a good idea.,7,Try to seperate your ESXi hosts, VM and, Networking and Storage data on seperate tabs for ease of identifying issues.,Some - we have done small customizations to the interface,No - we have not done any custom code,None.,5,No,During our proof of concept, support were excellent in responding to questions and giving us guidance.,Creating custom tabs with predefined metric data. This allows metrics for a node to be spread across multiple pages.
Viewing vital VM stats and loading additional metrics into the page.
Performing capacity recommendation reporting.
Configuring alerts.
Configuring view and dashboards within VMAN.,We dont really have any complaints or issues with any of the functionality.,Yes, but I don't use it,9,10,9,7,We have integrated our entire VMware estate,Not at this time.,Javascript widgets,9,Ensure the staff responsible have knowledge of planning and deployment of products of a similar nature. Also ensure they have key skills in VMware and Storage.,9,9,As we were purchasing multiple modules, we were able to negotiate a large discount which allowed us to be in a position to afford the paltform.,Be polite and easy to work with!,Yes,There were bug fixes in the recent upgrades, but nothing significant.,We're not aware of any major benefits or changes at this point.,No,NoRob BatesSolarWinds VMAN Review - A service provider perspective.2018-10-19T16:05:33.300ZAs 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.,10,Every business I have worked with who have adopted VMAN has seen an efficiency improvement. This means that they are able to run more guests on the same hardware, leading to an increased time before requiring further CAPEX for additional capacity.
Performance benefits, via heeding the recommendations within VMAN, are not to be underestimated. Once VMAN has enough metrics on your estate, it can quickly advise you which guests need more compute, but more importantly which ones are over-provisioined, and can have CPU/memory reduced! This leads to increased capacity.,If your host to guest ratios are not balanced, you could have a lopsided provision. This could lead to hardware failures, as one host is heavily utilised, whilst others are not. VMAN considers this, and will recommend moving guests between hosts accordingly, leading to longer service life for your host servers. With VMAN you can schedule the movement of guests between hosts, and have the software action the move itself, without the need to have an engineer action this change.
Whilst it's clearly sensible to have an engineer check the move was successful after the fact, you can rely on VMAN to get this job done.,Part of VMAN's powerful capacity planning is the ability to simulate how your current estate will cope with projected load. Using the capacity reports, you can see how many additional hosts (with similar specifications to hosts already monitored) you will need to cope with your projected increased guest population.
As all the metrics used by capacity planning are real ones gathered from your own estate, the reports are accurate, allowing you to commit to further CAPEX on additional hardware with confidence.,The core of SolarWinds Orion is it's flexibility. PerfStack is a perfect example. You can construct your own graphs of related metrics, and have a view of exactly what you want to see. From the VMAN perspective, you can drag host, guest, and application metrics together to paint a picture of application performance over time, quickly and simply, and share this dashboard with other Orion users.
This is not only a fantastic troubleshooting tool, but also allows users to create views of what is important to them, without the need to click between multiple different pages to get the different metrics.,SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, SolarWinds Network Configuration ManagerJez MarshSolarWinds Virtualization Manager helps buisness go forward2018-04-16T21:03:58.258ZSolarWinds Virtualization Manager is used by the enterprise IT [department] to manage the VMWare environment daily. Its 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.,10,This product will pay for itself. It's expensive to license but then pays for it self when you see it work every day.,VMAN saves time and man power. I can do the work of two or three with the product at my disposal. I fin it to be very helpful and an asset to the organization. VMAN has given insight, save time and money, as well as become a standard for skills required to have now going forward.,This is a very important tool as its helps in areas where expensive SAN storage is capitalized for the virtual environment. Its saves processor and ram over utilization and has helped us expand the life of the hardware between refresh. We will continue to leverage it as we plan our virtual roll-outs in the future.,this is something that really lets you dive in to the environment and look at how you are performing, where trouble exists, how you should plan for the future, and what is the real cause of issues. We were so excited to see this feature as it performs well and is a key part in our success.,vSphere,SolarWinds Log & Event Manager, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer,2,1,Overview of Virtual Infrastructure
Recommendations for changes to environment
Planning and forecasting,Sprawl, keeping it controlled
Capacity planning for future proofing the network,Budgeting for future years
Hardware justification
automation of recommendation processes,10,No,Product Features
Prior Experience with the Product
Existing Relationship with the Vendor,I don't know that o would change anything. I would still have chosen it since it is the best thing on the market.,Implemented in-house,No,Change management was minimal,Understanding how to configure the product
becoming familiar with the interface
ensuring all the items were configured to perform properly.,10,No,10,No,Case in point, I could not see the recommendations and they were able to resolve it. The process took several days but they technicians never stopped working on it. Each day we would work together to resolve the issue. this sometimes meant that we found other things needing fixed too and they were.,Recommendations
Sprawl
Capacity Planning,Reporting
Storage,No,10Jeremy MayfieldGreat starting tool but not not the best for automation2018-09-28T18:09:25.601ZWe 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,6,Snapshot Management - It is nice to have an automated tool for cleaning up snapshots because this is often forgotten in the day to day. One of those things that no one wants to do themselves
VM Management - we are still getting started with this but we keep finding it coming up a little short on exactly what we need, it will do most of the job we need but still requires some manual intervention.,It has helped identify issues and resolve some things. One of the more major drawbacks is its inability to identify specifically what the issue is. I.E. if you want a notification if one of your esxi hosts enters a warning state. You will get an alert if someone enables SSH on the host to do maintenance. It would be great if it identified the actual cause of the alert instead of "Red" or "Yellow" for its status. Granted you could mute the host but even if you don't its nice to know the actual issue before you login to vcenter otherwise its just hey there is a problem but i dont know what it is.,This is a nice feature to have but in our environment it doesn't really come into play. Usually we have done our own capacity planning and base that on historical data from Solarwinds itself. We have a lot of these notifications disabled because it tends to just become noise.,We do not currently use this feature.,,ThousandEyes, New Relic InfrastructureAustin Nickens
Windows
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
69 Ratings
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