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SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

VMAN, a virtualization monitoring and troubleshooting tool, has proven to be an invaluable asset for customers in managing their …
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Virtualization Manager

8 out of 10
December 08, 2020
Incentivized
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 …
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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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Product Details

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

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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) Competitors

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Reviews and Ratings

(123)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 65)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We love the snapshot reports we setup. It helps us determine when a vm has a snapshot and how long it has it. It allows us to keep our storage usage in check and prevents runway snapshots. We use the information to get let the app owners know we need to delete their snapshots.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently using it within my department as it does not provide any value to the other departments. It is currently used with all of our other SolarWinds products that provide a fantastic monitoring environment that helps us find/resolve issues quickly.
  • Monitoring virtualization environments.
  • Identifying asset locations within the virtualization environment.
  • Identifying possible causes of problems within our entire environment.
  • Orion environment can at times be slow to load.
This paired with the other SolarWinds suite of tools is a great all-encompassing monitoring environment. By itself it does a great job, but with everything else it's a complete solution for an entire environment.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Brian Ambarita | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is reliable when you have many virtualizations in your infrastructure. It helps you to maintain how effective & efficient you manage the virtualization with VMAN forecasting. Some customers have the problem where they can't manage multi hyper-converged into a single-pane dashboard, and VMAN makes it easier and faster.
  • VM capacity planning
  • VM forecasting
  • VM monitor multi hyperconverged
  • VM capacity advisor
  • More vendor could be covered
It will be useful if you have a large hyper-converged infrastructure.
February 17, 2020

SolarWinds VM Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We use SolarWindsVM and so far good, it's been very good. We can add devices on this and it is very easy to add the new device when needed. Larger companies may want to have a physical appliance though.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
We were hoping for more management based reporting and capacity management across the entire platform.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I can really only speak to v7.1 because future versions DO NOT deliver the information in the same way and the product had 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. The reason I wouldn't recommend it to a colleague is that its new ("supported") versions don't do what I want them to or what the old version did. The old version would clearly identify how servers (physical and virtual) were performing currently, as well as how they've performed historically, and I could see right away if things are "normal" or need attention. We tried subsequent versions, but the data refresh was not frequent enough to give the same easily understandable graphs.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is well suited for quickly viewing or revealing what is really going on in your VMware environment. You can customize your dashboards to see what you need or want to see. SolarWinds is well suited if you are limited in VMware resources, to reclaim resources from VMs that are over provisioned.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Our long-time virtual infrastructure manager had to go on medical leave and we were not sure if it would be short or long term. This tool allowed us to manage the short term while preparing for long term options.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 obfuscates a portion of your infrastructure. Virtualization admins have to know virtualization, Windows/Linux OSes, storage, networking, etc. Virtualization Manager helps break down those barriers of entry to new admins and gives visibility, reporting, and alerting capacity to experienced admins.

Regardless of the size of your environment, from a single cluster with a few hosts, to multiple virtual data centers, housing dozens and dozens of clusters, with thousands of VMs, VMAN can scale to give the insight needed. It did for us!
January 30, 2019

VMAN is the Man

Rob Bates | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Virtualization Manager is well suited to any enterprise organisation where the VM sprawl is getting out of hand or if you have hosts in different locations with different staff managing the inventory. It gives control back to you and a deep dive into whats actually happening on the hosts.
Timothy Sawah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • It is perfectly suited for environments with 100+ virtual servers. It is essential in environments with several clusters and 500+ virtual servers.
  • It would be optimal for hybrid environments with Hyper-V and VMware.
  • It can be expensive for small businesses.
  • It is not recommended in case most of the environment is on physical servers or cloud platforms
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
Well suited for syslog, netflow data. API integration benefits.

Slow in some scenarios.
Jez Marsh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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.
If you have on premise hypervisors, and they happen to be running vSphere or Hyper-V, you should look at picking up VMAN. It really is that simple. The insight it gives into your virtual infrastructure is far too important to ignore. Check out the free online demo via oriondemo.solarwinds.com, and click on "Dashboards>Virtualization" to see what you are missing out on.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
It is suited to monitor VM host environments, but without SAM and NPM does not have the specifics to monitor the VMs inside the environments. Not that it should have this, those products handle that very well, but for information's sake, it stops at the generality of Hosts and their needs.
Ryhlen Schoeberl | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It is great to use in an environment where you have quite a few virtual machines and more than one host. We use it in our environment with 4 hosts. I would see that it would not be used to its fullest potential if you only have one host machine in your environment.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

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.
  • Incorporating VMan back into Orion is a step back, we find performance is better having the standalone appliance.
  • Orion occasionally loses configuration of the connection to the VMan appliance.
  • SSL configuration is complicated to enable - gui setup would be preferred.

I find planning ahead using the capacity planning tab one of the most helpful parts of VMan, we often get projects that have not had storage considerations discussed and we have to quickly find available capacity or charge for additional resources to be purchased.

I feel the environment map could be improved along the lines of other type 'network' style maps.

Dathon Stokes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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?
It has a much simpler and easier to use interface than VMWare's product line for monitoring- however, if you're a VMWare shop, and you want to go all VMWare- this could be a redundant product.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

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.
Well suited to VMware, less so to Hyper-V at present.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 great if you have at least 4 hosts - at this level is where you start needing insights around your environment which this provides. It scales quite nicely and allows you to view high-level through to low-level detail, so using it to explain issues or business needs is easy.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are a Managed Services Provider, providing Cloud Services to multiple customers. We started using Virtualization Manager to monitor our own servers, and then branched out to monitor our customers' servers as well. This provides an added ROI to our customers, in that we can often locate and remediate a downed server before the customer is even aware of the outage.
  • We like the ease of adding our virtual environment to be managed. After a simple wizard, the Virtualization Manager imports the entire content of the vCenter and starts monitoring it.
  • Once machines have been detected, it's a snap to create alerts based on VM stats
  • Although machines can be added easily, these are seen from the hypervisor side, which means that it's not possible to monitor based on guest stats (Services, etc)
It is very well suited for large environments where a significant number of VMs need to get monitored and/or detailed statistics aren't a requirement. This also holds true in environments where VMs are added and removed on a regular basis. In smaller environments, it may be more effective to add the individual servers as Nodes directly to SolarWinds Orion.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for our department to monitor the basic layer of our virtualization environment which happens be VMware.
  • Basic summary of VM environment (Total VM's, status of VM's, and any critical alerts).
  • Suggest recommendations about CPU or memory usage.
  • Displays a clean and simple interface for the admin to look at.
  • Perhaps more integration on apply recommendations from the console.
  • Provide more of an insight as to where a storage performance issue is at.
If you are looking to gather basic information about the VM environment but are not looking for any detail or ways to apply fixes then this would be a good product.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Virtualization manager is used to support core infrastructure. It supports multiple server clusters and provides feedback for both support technicians and NOC users. It helps a smaller number of people keep on top of and manage a large number of servers. We also use it for smaller hosts in locations outside the core as they normally receive little attention. This allows us to monitor our entire virtualization infrastructure from a single pane of glass.

Virtualization manager especially provides us with at-a-glance monitoring of cluster and host loads. With multiple host operating systems and topologies this saves a lot of logging into individual systems to check performance and errors.
  • At-a-glance views of current problems and potential future problems.
  • The recommendations feature is fantastic. This helps us balance loads and look for soon to be problems on multiple devices in a single place. There are very few false positives.
  • Easy to set up and maintain. Out of the box the system connects to major vendors and begins monitoring with minimal hassle. There's no manual set up of agents, monitoring points or set up of the monitoring console.
  • With the SolarWinds Orion support you can easily add virtualization features to NOC screens and servers node pages. Alerts are tied in as well to reduce hassle of multiple alert managers.
  • Server trending could be stronger. A server which sits at the same resource usage day in and day out can be normal operation while Virtualization manager may report it as an issue.
  • Orion in general can be painful to change a node page with the desired screens and widgets
Any time you use virtualized infrastructure with multiple hosts. Especially where you may have multiple vendors. A single place to look for issues and having the capability to drill down into those issues (with other Orion products) can vastly decrease time-to-resolution. The Orion suite allowing for quick set up and able to go as in-depth as the technician would like is a fantastic feature.

If you're working with a small environment it may be more costly than the value provides. It really shines with larger environments.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Its used by the Infrastructure team to monitor the infrastructure gear like computing servers, network devices.
  • Monitoring the computing servers to get the health check and proactive alerts helps a lot in troubleshooting issues.
  • It's a one stop shop tool.
  • It really does magic with CISCO devices because it has very good compatibility with them.
  • It could be better if SolarWinds could do something with the grouping, dependencies and alerting part.
I have more experience with the NPM and it really suits my requirements by providing various functionalities like configuration management, log server, providing very good metrics, and widgets that are cool and very helpful for doing analysis of a particular node.
Austin Nickens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It is great if you need a quick and fast solution, it is more of a Swiss Army Knife of monitoring tools, it does a lot of things, but if you really want to go in depth on something or get a certain amount of details it can be cumbersome. Sometimes the level of effort can be really low but it could also be really high; snapshot management was a big win and was very easy to implement. Management groups of VMs or nodes get more complicated even if it is a fleet of similar VMs that provide the same function, you are limited to the capabilities of Virtualization Manager. It doesn't allow for a lot of automation that we are looking to implement, we are looking to rebuild our VMs on the fly, utilize containerization, etc and this doesn't have enough functionality for this need.
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