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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

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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

(1-25 of 28)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use SolarWinds VMAN to monitor our virtualized environment. It gives me in-depth knowledge of the health of our environment and provides recommendations to optimize it as well! The dashboard is rich and customizable.
  • VM sprawl management
  • Capacity planning
  • Performance management
  • visibility across all of our datacenters
  • N/A
SolarWinds VMAN is beneficial in environments that have grown and have become hard to manage due to size. VMAN brings everything under one roof and has the intelligence to provide you with suggestions to keep it running like a top. It has saved me countless times when it comes to VM performance issues by letting me know that they were lacking resources.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
I would recommend Virtualization Manager to any colleague that already has a SolarWinds Implementation, or is looking to implement a SolarWinds Monitoring Solution. The licensing and support for one product are much simpler than mixing products. If a colleague is already full into another solution such as Operations Manager and SCCM, then I think I would recommend something along with the Microsoft Family of monitoring products.
Sharique Khan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
I believe SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is well suited for monitoring and troubleshooting virtualized infrastructure in an enterprise setting, especially with variable load requirements.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For us, in production control, it turns out to be a useful tool, which helps us monitor our virtualized environment based on VMWare in real-time. It is practically our day to day in execution of reports to know the health of our hardware based on cisco UCS servers as hosts, as well as in knowing the health of our virtual servers, monitoring practically everything. Obtaining information which prevents us from having a catastrophic failure. It is also a tool that has a very friendly interface and easy to use and is easy to configure. For us, keeping the servers always operating is our main objective, avoiding having non-productive times, which results in having large economic losses due to stopping production. With Solarwinds we are always aware of the status of our virtual infrastructure since alerts are received via email 24/7 giving us time to react satisfactorily.
  • Real-time virtual machine and hardware health status.
  • Comparison between consumption of processor and memory usage of the Hosts against the consumption of memory usage and processors of virtual machines.
  • Consumption of processor, memory, and storage usage across clusters in real-time.
  • Veeam integration for direct backups from Orion for guest OS.
Where you want to know the health of the infrastructure in real-time and know the proper optimization of resources VMAN is the indicated tool, due to its easy use of administration, configuration, and obtaining reports.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is used by our Server Team for monitoring our VM environment on Windows and Red Hat. This includes monitoring the VMWare ESX server and all VM's in our environment. It provided performance reports, VM sprawl Management, VM recommendations (over-allocate or under-allocated resources assigned to the VM). Provided Capacity Planning and reporting features.
  • Performance Management
  • Recommendations
  • Virtualization Sprawl
  • VMWare Events
  • Additional OOB Reports
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) provides complete insight into your VMWare and hypervisor environment. This includes cloud and on-prem. Virtualization Asset Summary provides recommendations for fine-tuning your VM environment for performance issues. It lets you know if you have over-allocated/under-allocated your resources to your VM. VMAN also provides information on the Storage which supports the VM environment. Capacity planning reports are available to find out if the current VM environment can support future demands for your business or if additional resources will be needed.
December 08, 2020

Virtualization Manager

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 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.
It works good in a large environment.
Nikhil Kumar Sharma | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 VMAN is best suited for VMWare and Hyper-V Hosts environment monitoring from hardware perspective and VM Guest Perspective. However Solarwinds has introduced support for Nuatanix environment monitoring that still need more enhancements, and hence its a good start by Solarwinds - but too early to say perfect solution. Sprawling is also another feature which makes it more usable.
Jeremy Mayfield | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is used by the enterprise IT [department] to manage the VMWare environment daily. It gives deep insight beyond what vSphere can and also ties back to storage and hardware giving me a single pane of glass view.

  • Recommendations. Those are wonderful. You build out your environment based on a set of criteria from a vendor or others, only to find your resources are poorly used. The VMAN product allows you to make adjustments based on its recommendations and it automates the process for you.
  • Pinpoints guests with problems. It provides a graphical and then drills down details to the virtual guests with issues you need to address immediately.
  • Capacity planning and sprawl. VMAN gives you all the tools you need to prvent sprawl and plan for the future.
  • Licensing. One of the most glaring elements to SolarWinds is the way they license. I feel they could improve this a bit. It a easy process just costly.
  • They tell you about orphaned VMDK but don't tell you where it might be used. It says it might be, I feel it should check.
It's integrated with the SolarWinds Orion platform of tools, it has great insight, and works well. It has saved me staff by helping me be more automated and efficient. The automated alerting is very valuable and when combined with the other tools in Orion and offerings from SolarWinds gives you and complete solution for everyday use.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is vital to our full stack monitoring solution. Spanning global datacentres and branch offices SW VM provides full coverage of our virtual estate. It's main benefit is resource both in human and technical sense. As an engineer allowing me to diagnose and resolve outages in a significantly quicker timeframe. Benefitting both end users for internal systems but also our customers.

Its in depth coverage also allows us to identify wasteful resources and maximise our efficiency bringing real savings to infrastructure on premise costs.
  • In depth VM and Host coverage, particularly metrics such as CPU ready time, no more calculations working out % based on ms latency - its all available at glance of a chart.
  • Coverage of both SAN and VM environments compliments eachother really well allowing us to diagnose any bottle necks within 15 minutes compared to an hour prior to using SW VM.
  • Custom dashboards allows all our engineers to customise their NOC views allowing the umbrella departments to quicker respond or be able to proactively work with other departments to avoid downtime.
  • AWS coverage, not had major chance to research but seems to lack native compatibility for AWS specific services - such as ECS / Cloudfront metrics etc.
  • Some container technologies such as Docker, again not had much time to research but upon first investigations doesn't seem as native to implement monitoring compared to say VMware.
  • AD deep dive monitoring - replication times etc.
It would appear more mature with regards to on premise workloads in comparison to cloud workloads - but I would like to imagine this is all being handled in the roadmap.

Also as per previous point with regards to container workloads. Not sure if agent of some form is being developed we could include in container images relatively easily?

Neil Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds is our go to platform for monitoring all live/dev and test systems. VM is a critical tool in keeping tabs on performance and planning
  • Optimisation of resources used
  • Forward capacity planning
  • Problem resolution
  • Improved graphical displays
  • Analyses of groups of servers
Ensuring you have space to grow is easily monitored with SVM
Highlighting over provisioned servers
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It provides a good deal of information in a relatively concise format, which allows for easier management and a quick view of the entire infrastructure
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Well suited for our VMware environment. Was able to show us where the bottlenecks were. Was able to reclaim virtual resources by controlling VM sprawl.
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.
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 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
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 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.
Roland Biggerstaff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
If you are using other SolarWinds products it integrates well and is easy to learn.
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