Solarwinds VMAN 10 years later..
We make use of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) to monitor our virtual infrastructure. This includes monitoring snapshot usage, …
Overview
What is SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)?
SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.
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What is SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)?
SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.
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What is SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)?
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 (VMAN) Features
- Supported: Hypervisor specific active alerting
- Supported: Virtual machine resource planning
- Supported: Actionable recommendations for remediation of active and predicted VM performance
- Supported: Visibility into VM Sprawl reclaims resources
- Supported: Remediate issues without having to log in to a hypervisor
- Supported: Intuitive dashboards that highlight the most important issues
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Screenshots
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) 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 (VMAN) Integrations
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Competitors
- Dynatrace
- Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
- Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)
- VMware vROps
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.
Dynatrace and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure are common alternatives for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN).
Reviewers rate Solarwinds Premier Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.3.
The most common users of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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- Business Problems Solved
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- Recommendations
VMAN, a virtualization monitoring and troubleshooting tool, has proven to be an invaluable asset for customers in managing their virtualized environments. Users have relied on VMAN to monitor and alert on various aspects of their virtualized environment, such as disk space availability and newly created virtual machines - VMs. With VMAN, users have been able to identify issues with hosts and VM servers that are not visible in vSphere, providing deep insight beyond the capabilities of vSphere alone.
A key use case for VMAN is its ability to help users identify over or under provisioned VM servers and make resource adjustments as needed. The tool provides a single pane of glass view that includes storage and hardware information, giving users a complete view of their virtualized environment. This comprehensive view has allowed users to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and upgrade planning.
Furthermore, VMAN has been instrumental in supporting IT operations teams in monitoring and managing virtual machines, ensuring proper resource allocation and identifying inactive VMs. It also assists in managing servers by providing important statistics, troubleshooting capabilities, and capacity planning. Through centralized alerting and troubleshooting across virtualization, server hardware, and network switching, VMAN empowers users to efficiently address performance issues and ensure smooth operation of their virtual infrastructure.
In addition to these core use cases, VMAN integrates seamlessly with other SolarWinds products, enabling users to monitor the entire virtualization structure and understand its impact on overall performance. This integration allows for proactive management of the environment by monitoring multiple sites and clusters.
Overall, VMAN simplifies the management of virtualized environments by providing deep insights into resource utilization, proactive monitoring capabilities, and streamlined troubleshooting. Its wide range of features has contributed to improved efficiency, reduced downtime, optimized resource allocation, and enhanced overall performance for many organizations.
Emailed alerts: Users have found the emailed alerts provided by VMAN to be fantastic, with multiple reviewers expressing their satisfaction. This feature allows users to stay informed about important events and issues related to their virtual infrastructure, ensuring prompt actions can be taken when necessary.
Customizable dashboards: The ability to customize dashboards has been highly regarded by users of VMAN. This functionality allows them to tailor the display of information according to their specific monitoring needs and preferences, providing a more personalized and efficient monitoring experience.
Comprehensive range of features: Reviewers have praised the comprehensive range of features offered by VMAN for virtual infrastructure monitoring. They appreciate that VMAN provides a wide variety of tools and capabilities such as capacity planning, performance management recommendations, configuration management, chargeback automation, and managing across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. This extensive feature set ensures that users have all the necessary resources at their disposal for effective virtual infrastructure management.
Licensing Cost: Several users have mentioned that the licensing process of SolarWinds is easy but costly, and they suggest that it could be improved to provide better value for money.
Setup Issues and Unhelpful Support: A number of users have experienced difficulties during the setup of SolarWinds, particularly with connecting to hosts and vCenters. They felt that the support team was unhelpful and only directed them to articles they had already read.
Navigation and Integration Challenges: Users have found the navigation in the VMAN console to be difficult and time-consuming, suggesting that it needs improvement. Additionally, there are ongoing issues with the lack of integration between VMAN and the main SolarWinds Orion console.
Users commonly recommend the following three suggestions for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager:
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Customize the product by taking advantage of customization options offered by a partner or SolarWinds to tailor the product to their specific needs. This allows users to optimize the functionality of Virtualization Manager and make it more aligned with their requirements.
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Utilize online training and community support by leveraging online training resources provided by SolarWinds and actively participating in the thwack community. These platforms offer valuable insights, best practices, and troubleshooting assistance from other users and experts, enhancing the overall experience with Virtualization Manager.
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Maintain VMs/hosts regularly by ensuring regular maintenance of virtual machines (VMs) and hosts. Staying on top of maintenance tasks such as updates, patches, and monitoring performance is crucial for maximizing the benefits of Virtualization Manager. By doing so, users can effectively manage their virtual infrastructure and achieve optimal results.
By implementing these recommendations, users can further enhance their usage of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and fully leverage its capabilities for their virtualization needs.
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January 25, 2022
Single Pane of Glass for Infrastructure Monitoring
We use VMAN with our current SolarWinds Orion Monitoring to provide a single pane of a glass monitoring solution for the different segments of our IT Infrastructure. This allows our Global Service Delivery Team to monitor our Infrastructure in multiple regions at once, and help decrease our TTR for issues that arise.
- Integrates with other SolarWinds Products
- Integrates to monitor Third Party Products
- Provides capacity planning predictions
- VM management across multiple platforms
- Performance optimization for web interface
- More modular services
- Integrated reporting plugins
- More mature scripting abilities
January 24, 2022
Great Alternative Tool to Manage Your VMs
My organization has used the SolarWinds VMAN to provide remediation assistance to solve virtualization issues by monitoring VM performance and identifying datastores with IOPS latencies.
- It helps minimize performance inhibitors by co-relating events.
- It accelerates troubleshooting of VM performance.
- The GUI makes it a breeze to use.
- It can be expensive.
- It is only a Windows-based solution.
- Reporting should be more granular and refined.
January 23, 2022
Well suited for monitoring complex hybrid environments
We use this to monitor multiple virtualization environments in our organization to get a good view of the health and performance of all the environments in a single pane of glass. This product has proved to be a big help with managing VM sprawl, which was previously becoming an issue to manage.
- Performance monitoring
- Managing VM sprawl and orphaned VMDKs
- Identify problems quickly
- More automation for doing DevOps
- System speed and performance
We used SolarWinds Virtualization Manager to monitor performance and plan capacity for virtualization infrastructure. Its recommendations also come in handy to identify possible bottlenecks and optimization possibilities. PerfStack and Sprawl dashboard are handy tools suited for the purpose. Simulations can be used to plan for future capacity. It also had good integration with Orion products.
- Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring
- Capacity Planning
- Dashboards
- Better Dashboards for cloud providers
- Detailed documentation
January 19, 2022
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN), helps do my job and saves me money at the same time.
One of the great aspects of Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is how well it integrates into the Orion platform. We use other Solarwinds products such as SAM and IPAM so all that information is gathered and shown in the correct (expected) locations.
VMAN itself can be configured to only give suggestions or can carry them out automatically. If you know the Orion platform you'll quickly become an expert in VMAN.
VMAN itself can be configured to only give suggestions or can carry them out automatically. If you know the Orion platform you'll quickly become an expert in VMAN.
- Finds over committed virtual machines.
- Shows suggested additions or removals of resources per VM such as RAM and CPU.
- Shows expected growth in datastores based on past growth.
- VMAN could use a better integration with vCenter when it comes to affinity rules.
January 18, 2022
Wide Area Network Monitoring Tools
allows monitoring, setup, and configuration of all important network gear, circuits of our company in real-time
- ICMP monitoring
- colored detail of circuits
- IP address testing
- GUI standup
- your down or up, no chance for bouncing circuits to recover
- more user friendly
December 17, 2020
One of the best products
We wanted to use one place for monitoring. Single pane of glass.
So instead of using VROPS and basic vCenter monitoring we using VMAN inside SolarWinds [Virtualization Manager (VMAN)] to achieve this task.
So instead of using VROPS and basic vCenter monitoring we using VMAN inside SolarWinds [Virtualization Manager (VMAN)] to achieve this task.
- VM sprawl management
- Manage across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud
- Visibility across the entire application stack
- Virtual environment reclamation and waste
- Deleting snapshots and zombie files
[SolarWinds] Virtualization Manager [(VMAN)] is a module (agent) that we use inside Orion, that actually we use as a whole system to monitor our entire infrastructure.
Specifically, VMAN is used by the System team and the NOC team in different continents and allows us to perform monitoring and remediation for our on-prem and servers in the cloud.
- Central management
- Identify and reclaim resources
- Speed up problem resolution
- Slow due to the huge database
- Cost
December 08, 2020
Virtualization Manager
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.
November 30, 2020
What else can be better than VMAN when mostly used Virtualization Vendor got covered
We are using SolarWinds VMAN to monitor virtualization environment such as VMWare, Hyper-V, Nuatanix environment. Our infrastructure teams used to follow their separate native tools to do monitoring or rely on email alerts to know about the issue, but that was all reactive not proactive, and hence SolarWinds VMAN came in and filled that gap.
- Hierarchal representation of the assets such as DC, Cluster, Host and VMs
- Sprawling Features
- Datastore Monitoring
- Nuatanix Environment needs more parameters
- Capacity Reporting and integration with Storage
- Include more vendor support
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager has been utilized since we started having a large percentage of our servers move from physical to virtual. It helps us manage the servers and get important statistics from them. A lot of our server team also use it for troubleshooting and capacity planning.
- The capacity planning tools have been very helpful to see where we stand, and to prepare for new workloads and growth
- The virtualization alerts are pretty helpful in responding to issues and assisting with troubleshooting
- The Virtualization manager tools are a nice way for our IT managers to see everything at a glance, and get some detailed information
- I would like more options of things that can be displayed or tracked on the dashboard
- The reports are a little clunky or confusing to setup, especially custom reports
- Overall it does what we need, I really don't use it as much as other staff here
July 14, 2020
Awesome product!
Virtual Manager is being used for monitoring our vSAN clusters and accompanying VMs. We use it to bring alerting and performance analysis under one pane of glass.
- It monitors alerts and configuration issues in real-time and notifies relevant personnel.
- It provides summary pages that allow you to see all of your systems in one place.
- It recommends options for dealing with issues and allows you to address them from within the VMM program itself.
- The only thing I can think of is that many alert messages are redundant and it takes a while to go through and filter the extra alerts and cut down on the number of event messages.
June 29, 2020
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Review
SolarWinds it is a great tool, used during the last 10 years, by different teams inside IT Operations to detail, monitor, and notify thousands of different infrastructure and network devices that are physical and virtualized, on-premise and in the cloud and run in different environments and are going from simple to very specific monitoring configurations.
- Easy to add devices to the SolarWinds console
- A great visual Dashboard and console
- A wide range of devices to monitor
- Really good and customizable options for notifications
- It could add more detail specifically for Unix servers.
- Integrate more cloud services to monitor using the SolarWinds console
May 13, 2020
Brief but to the point
We use it to manage our VMware servers. We use it to monitor and help manages these servers and address issues as they arise. It gives us the ability to plan for future growth with measuring CPU utilization, memory and HDD space.
- The proactive monitoring.
- Ability to troubleshoot issues.
- Reporting on usage.
- Future planning for HDD space.
- Very costly.
- Resource utilization on the server it resides.
- Lack of reporting on EtherChannel.
May 08, 2020
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Review
Currently, segments of the company are using SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. This is the primary monitoring tool.
- Monitoring of our devices
- Quick access to all info on status
- Repository for historical status
- Maybe more info on discovery failures on what failed rather than coded info
- A phone app if it's not already available
- Multi-view home screen to view selected devices as a group and flip between--Tshoot tool
We are using SolarWinds Virtualization Manager to help manage our VMWare environment. We have reports that indicate what VMs have snapshots, whether there are systems with memory ballooning, etc.
- VM snapshot reports.
- Managing various clusters we have.
- Flexibility on setting the reporting piece.
- Overall, setup of the appliance was fairly straight forward.
- Upgrading the appliance can be a pain at times.
April 25, 2020
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Review
It is used across the whole organization. Proactive monitoring gives false alerts. For example, when monitoring snapshots. When we call support, we get answers that this feature is not available, etc.
- Auto discovery via VMAN.
- Proactive monitoring of guest disk/ virtual disk.
- It does predictions based on usage of VM resources.
- Proactive VM status monitoring.
- Snapshot monitoring is not good.
- SolarWinds support assistance for customization is not good.
February 17, 2020
SolarWinds VM Review
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 12, 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.
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
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.
January 30, 2019
VMAN is the Man
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
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 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.