TrustRadius Insights
VMAN, a virtualization monitoring and troubleshooting tool, has proven to be an invaluable asset for customers in managing their …
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.
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Pricing
N/A
Unavailable
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
13 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is Citrix DaaS?
Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, or XenDesktop) is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and application virtualization solution from Citrix.
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
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).
Comparisons
Compare with
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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- 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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
(51-65 of 65)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 28, 2018
Works will with our monitoring products.
We use it in our IT department for quick access from dashboards we currently use with other SolarWinds products. It shows the various health statuses and information of our VMs and centralizes our alerting and troubleshooting across all our virtualization, server hardware, and network switching. It is very useful for capacity planning and creating cases for upgrades/replacements.
- Gives me useful detail on every object and the ability to drill into more detailed data is great.
- The ability to predict when resources will become constrained.
- Emailed alerts that and the ability to customize them.
- Licensing. Difficult- expensive- constant sales cycle
September 28, 2018
Resource Recovery
It is being used solely by the IT operations team. We use it primarily to watch for over and under-resourced virtual machines and those that have been shut down for an extended period time.
- Reporting on resources allocated versus utilized\needed.
- Memory ballooning and restrictions
- CPU ready and wait times
- None at this time
September 28, 2018
VMAN is getting better but not an end all solution
Everyone in the department has access to SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) but I am the primary stakeholder and use it to get info from my vCenter environment. It slightly assists in placing VMs on the various hosts and attempts to show where resources can be reclaimed.
- I like that I can delete snapshots from the Orion console
- I like that I can get info/alerts on virtual guests that are not even added to Orion yet as long as the host is part of the vCenter I am monitoring
- Like a single pain of glass where I can see all my metrics
- The reporting needs a ton of work!!! RVTOOLS does and reports on everything in vCenter. I want all the info from the vCenter to be able to report on....like annotations.
- I need cost analysis for moving my workload into AWS and Azure, ASAP!!!
September 27, 2018
Great Virtualization Monitoring/Optimization Tool
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is being used in our organization to help maximize our physical assets in which our virtual platform resides on. It gives us recommendations to either increase or decrease the number of CPUs and memory based on a virtual machine's performance. It also, lets us know when we have "unbalanced" hosts in our ESX cluster. It solves performance issues as well as help us get the maximum benefit from our physical assets.
- Recommendations - CPU/Memory utilization
- Storage space monitoring
- Give us a good "At a glance" picture of our overall virtual network.
- What-if Scenarios
- Not really a feature issue, but licensing can get pretty expensive.
- I really don't find any of the current features difficult to use. It's a relatively simple product.
September 27, 2018
Solar style
The whole of IT uses it in some capacity. This group of tools makes us much more in tune with our vast infrastructure and how any alerting areas can affect other things.
- Insightful detail on every object and the ability to drill into more detailed data is great.
- Ability to manage virtually every setting and affect parameters right through the GUI makes it a one stop shopping tool.
- Alerting on a plethora of aspects and allowing us to customize that to send texts and or change the on-call person for each piece is great.
- It works well for us!
- It has a great ROI for us, as we can all be plugged into all aspects of our operations and not have to mess around with 20 other tools to do that.
September 26, 2018
Our VMan
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!
September 25, 2018
Happy I chose Virtualization Manager
Some of the daily uses are looking for over-allocation of resources. Developers love to ask for the huge amount of RAM and CPU yet by using Virtualization Manager we can prove there was never a need for such a waste of resources.
- Show over the allocation of resources.
- Find forgotten snapshots
- Datastore monitoring.
- Management. Currently, instead of being a member of a group to use recommendations, a user must be added on his own.
September 05, 2018
Virtualization Manager predicts the future
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is being used across the enterprise. This includes all remote locations. We monitor resources in order to make decisions on upgrades and keep an eye on performance issues.
- Monitors resources and makes recommendations on changes and upgrades.
- Predicts when resources will become constrained.
- Reports on underutilized resources so that they can be allocated elsewhere.
- Sometimes VM seems to over report on issues. An example would be that we have allocated memory to the VMs to a point at the monitored threshold. Instead of it understanding that was allocated and basing memory utilization on the host based on its available memory (for the host OS), it reports warnings that it is low on memory resources. This should be an option.
- The View ID for the NOC view changes when a change is made to the view. This makes keeping a NOC display computer difficult to manage as you have to update the URL on to get the updated NOC view.
April 16, 2018
Your new VM Examiner - SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
We currently have SolarWinds Virtualization Manager deployed in our organization, in conjunction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor. We use Virtualization Manager to monitor our VM environment, which consists of 35 ESXi Hosts and 575 running VMs. It helps to identify any issues with hosts of VM servers, that are not normally visible in VMWare. We are able to identify any over or under provisioned VM servers, and add/remove resources as needed.
- Dashboards - The dashboards for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager allow for customization, and can be designed to show only the information needed.
- Virtual Appliance - SolarWinds Virtualization Manager offers an appliance installation option, making it simple to install and deploy.
- Reports - The reports SolarWinds Virtualization Manager offers (both the pre-canned and custom) are the reason we continue to use this. We can easily generate or create custom reports, that we can provide to our internal 'clients' for Charge-back or to management when it comes to purchases of new hardware.
- Licensing - Licensing is sold in blocks of sockets, so if you are over a current block by just 1 socket, you will need to buy the license of the next block of sockets.
- Integration/Uptime - Works well with the dashboard along with SAM, but sometimes the VM dialog boxes go blank, and the SolarWinds appliance server needs a reboot.
- Small Toolset - It is more for reporting, as it's function outside of VMWARE/Hyper-V are limited. You cannot deploy VMs from a template from the VM interface.
June 03, 2016
The right tool for the right price
We needed a tool to tell us what was going on with our vSphere environment beyond what vCenter was telling us. There are just 2 of us that manage 40 ESXi hosts 1000 virtual machines and we needed some additional insight. I have some daily & weekly reports sent to my inbox to help keep tabs on things like available disk space and newly created VMs.
- The various screens are fully customizable to what is important to you is right there.
- There are plenty of canned reports that can be customized and scheduled
- For the price virtualization manager does a great job.
- Setup takes some planning. There are 2 components to Virtualization Manager. First there is an appliance to deploy. Then a Windows server is needed to run the Solar Winds Orion engine. So there are 2 systems to keep updated and apply license keys to.
Our current server infrastructure is about 85% virtualized on a VMWare platform. We use Solarwinds VMAN to monitor and alert us of a variety of things in order to help keep our environment healthy and ready for expansion.
- VMAN does a great job of breaking down our SAN storage that contains our virtual environment. We can see current usage and forecast future capacity needs.
- VMAN also allows us to gather some excellent reports on our current virtual environment. We use it to gain insight into our current virtual machines and whether they are over-utilized or under-utilized.
- Real-time stats are also very helpful in VMAN, allowing us to pinpoint with precision potential issues that could occur in the near future.
- While the reporting is overall very good, we have wanted to see more granular reporting from VMAN. Specifically, reporting on VM Operating Systems and versioning.
- There is a feature on VMAN that analyzes cost savings with VMAN. This could be better explained and the prices could be more itemized.
April 19, 2016
A quick glance is all it takes
We use it in our IT department for quick access dashboards that show the various health statuses and information of our VMs.
- Shows obvious graphical status of what's going on right now
- Emailed alerts
- Fantastic drilldown
- Seamless incorporation into the Orion framework
- Great community
- Less system overhead
- Less redundancy with other Orion packages
- Create a singular VM hierarchy that removes the legacy Orion server mishmash
February 10, 2016
How Virtual Environment Optimization help us grow.
It's being used to help manage our growing VMWare environment, and for getting more out of our hosts with less costs in our data center.
- Helps manage our VMWare environment.
- Helped us consolidate our infrastructure.
- We need less people to manage our environment now that we have implemented Virtual Environment Optimization.
- Better patch/update cycle.
- More online help.
We use SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) to provide key monitoring and metrics for our organization as well as for several of our customers. We provide industrial operational technology and traditional IT services to many of our customers, who often lack the technical knowledge to deeply monitor their environment. In the last three years, the amount of virtualization in the industrial arena has started to grow exponentially, and VMAN has given us a needed tool to be able provide the in-depth monitoring and trouble-shooting our customers are requesting. Since we also provide equipment leases, it is imperative that we be able to monitor across not only our our own servers, but customers as well. VMAN, combined with several other components of SolarWinds has given us that capability. In several cases, VMAN has allowed us to show up at our customers door with replacement hardware in hand without their even knowing they had a problem.
- Near effortless addition of all VMs on a cluster. Simply add the information for the vCenter Server, and all VMs automatically populate in SolarWinds. In large environments, this is a huge timesaver!
- Snapshot management is a power feature of VMAN. VMAN identifies phantom snapshots, large snapshots and old snapshots. Considering that snapshots shouldn't hang around too long, it is still too easy to make one and forget about it. VMAN makes it easy to locate these snapshots for removal.
- Rightsizing VMs. VMAN analyzes VMs for CPU, memory and disk usage, and reports and provides tools to quickly identify undersized or over-sized VMs.
- The ability to create alerts and alarms within Solarwinds is very well developed. You can generate highly complex conditional alerts.
- VMAN's Integration with the main SolarWinds Orion console could be better. Not all functionality is well integrated through Orion. The VMAN console is available as an embedded website via the Virtualization tab, but going to a website is not the same as integrating the functionality. Syncing between Orion and VMAN seems to break somewhat often.
- Navigation in the VMAN console needs to be improved. It is not always easy or quick to find what you are looking for.
- Time Travel (besides hating the name) is a cool concept - that you can select an item, and 'travel back through time' to look at what was going on across the whole environment at a point in time. But I think it fails to deliver its full potential. Although you can click and stroll through time, there is no way that it will automatically find events. I'd like to see some search functionality that would allow it to travel back in time to find events, rather than having to know what date/time/device you are looking for.