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.
A necessity for any virtual environment!
SolarWinds VMAN Easy-to-Use Monitoring Virtual Environment
Single Pane of Glass for Infrastructure Monitoring
Great Alternative Tool to Manage Your VMs
Well suited for monitoring complex hybrid environments
SolarWinds VMAN - A Great Solution for Virtual Infra Management and Monitoring
SolarWinds VMAN is a Solid Product
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN), helps do my job and saves me money at the same time.
For effective virtual administration VMAN offers more!!!
SolarWinds VMAN Powerful and Simple VM Monitoring
Wide Area Network Monitoring Tools
One of the best products
So instead of using VROPS and basic vCenter monitoring we using VMAN …
A virtual machine monitoring and management tool that helps you with remediations
Virtualization Manager
What else can be better than VMAN when mostly used Virtualization Vendor got covered
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Pricing
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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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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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
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
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(123)Community Insights
- 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.
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Utilize online training and community support by leveraging online training resources provided by SolarWinds and actively participating in the thwack community. These platforms offer valuable insights, best practices, and troubleshooting assistance from other users and experts, enhancing the overall experience with Virtualization Manager.
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Maintain VMs/hosts regularly by ensuring regular maintenance of virtual machines (VMs) and hosts. Staying on top of maintenance tasks such as updates, patches, and monitoring performance is crucial for maximizing the benefits of Virtualization Manager. By doing so, users can effectively manage their virtual infrastructure and achieve optimal results.
By implementing these recommendations, users can further enhance their usage of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and fully leverage its capabilities for their virtualization needs.
Attribute Ratings
- 8.6Likelihood to Renew7 ratings
- 8.2Availability1 rating
- 6.4Performance1 rating
- 9Usability7 ratings
- 8.8Support Rating6 ratings
- 9.1Implementation Rating3 ratings
- 10Configurability2 ratings
- 9.1Product Scalability1 rating
- 8.2Ease of integration1 rating
- 10Vendor pre-sale2 ratings
- 10Vendor post-sale2 ratings
- 9.3Solarwinds Premier Support Rating9 ratings
- 3.5SolarWinds Smart Start Support Rating2 ratings
Reviews
(1-3 of 3)SolarWinds Virtualization Manager helps buisness go forward
- 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.
- This product will pay for itself. It's expensive to license but then pays for it self when you see it work every day.
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
- Overview of Virtual Infrastructure
- Recommendations for changes to environment
- Planning and forecasting
- Sprawl, keeping it controlled
- Capacity planning for future proofing the network
- Budgeting for future years
- Hardware justification
- automation of recommendation processes
- Implemented in-house
- Understanding how to configure the product
- becoming familiar with the interface
- ensuring all the items were configured to perform properly.
- no training
- Recommendations
- Sprawl
- Capacity Planning
- Reporting
- Storage
VMAN is the Man
- 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.
- We have certainly stopped some outages, particulary where delta files from abandoned VMs have been left to grow. In the past this would have caused an outage with the VM going offline.
- We have reduced resources being consumed by using the over provisoning reporting.
- Gaining visibility of how our ESXi hosts and Clusters behave.
- Visibility of VM issues, such as bad out of date VMware tools, snapshots , storage issues.
- Over provisioning of VM resources and being able to claw back said resources.
- Reporting and recommendations on future expansions in our ESXi environments.
- We were unaware of just how much over provisioning was happening with VMs which VMAN highlighed in the first few days.
- We intend on using VMAN to predict future expansions using the reporting elements.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
- Implemented in-house
- We had issues polling some of our vCenters and ESXi hosts, in particular the hardware elements of the chassis, we discovered this was due to a proxy issue in the end, in our environment. However it meant hardware monitoring was unavailable.
- Self-taught
- Creating custom tabs with predefined metric data. This allows metrics for a node to be spread across multiple pages.
- Viewing vital VM stats and loading additional metrics into the page.
- Performing capacity recommendation reporting.
- Configuring alerts.
- Configuring view and dashboards within VMAN.
- We dont really have any complaints or issues with any of the functionality.
- We have integrated our entire VMware estate
- Not at this time.
- Javascript widgets
- There were bug fixes in the recent upgrades, but nothing significant.
- We're not aware of any major benefits or changes at this point.
- 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.
- We installed Solarwinds and VMAN at a customer site. They initially were not sold that it was a product that would be of any practice use. Two weeks later, they had an issue with one of their ESX hosts. The tech had spent hours trying to find out the issue, and finally called us. Enter VMAN. Less than 2 minutes later, I was showing the customer the problem though VMAN. Not only did this win the customer over, but they have now become one of VMANs biggest advocates to their peers in the industry.
- Solarwinds is expensive, and the VMAN license costs are not trivial. Licenses are sold per socket (processor). For us, the start up costs for SolarWinds still have negative ROI. Our business model is heavily customer driven, and as we add customers, we expect positive ROI in a year to two.
- Solarwinds has increased our staff efficiency. We now rely on Solarwinds, and VMAN as a key piece of it, to provide critical alerting as the primary means to identity problems. VMAN provides a fairly rapid means to sort through a complex mesh of data. Coupled with reporting and graphs available through VMAN, it lets us control our environment rather than the other way around. When there is a problem, we no longer spends hours or more trying to isolate it. Usually we can identify root cause withing minutes.
- Proactive support of multiple customer locations for lease based installations.
- Alerting of error and warning conditions
- Capacity analysis and performance analysis both internally and for customers.
- VPN based monitoring of customer locations on a 24X7 basis
- VMAN has allowed us to notify customers of problems before they know that there is a problem. This has included showing up at the door with replacement hardware before there was an outage.
- VMAN provides a capacity planning tools that we will be able to use as customer environments grow.
- VMAN will become an integrated part of documenting our SLAs with customers
- Product Features
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Analyst Reports
- Implemented in-house
- There seemed to be a single right order for installing the solarwinds modules. VMAN itself was easy - deploy an OVF. Nevertheless, keep backups along the way, or you might find yourself starting all over again
- We realized the need for more than just the need for SQL Express. We were able to complete the implementation, but had to order, install and migrate data to SQL-Standard not long after we were operations
- Alert Storms were a nightmare originally. Too many things alerting by default. It took a while to stem the tide of alerts from things we really didn't need alerted on.
- My favorite function is using VMAN to locate old/large/phantom snapshots. Much more convenient than vCenter!!!
- VMAN integrated easily with Solarwinds Orion console. 95% of what I need I get from the VMAN Orion integration.
- Reporting in VMAN is second to none. I have not found anything yet that there wasn't a report already created for.
- Navigation screens are often cluttered and inconsistent. There is a mixture of tabs, buttons, links and icons of which the location changes from screen to screen. Some consistency and redesign is needed.
- Graphing in VMAN needs improvement. Graphs have an unpolished look, and generally are sized too large to fit on a screen.
- Integration with Solarwinds Orion does not include all VMAN functionality. This is too bad, because the presentation of data in Orion is much richer than in VMAN.