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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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Awards

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Pricing

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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.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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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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Comparisons

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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

(1-1 of 1)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
  • 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.
We're also a Veeam customer and have assessed Veeam ONE. We found the interface to be lacking and the contents misleading. Having VMAN in a single pane of glass integrated with the rest of our Orion products makes life very easy and everything very clear. The features that VMAN provides out of the box we also found to be far better than that of Veeam ONES.
30
Virtualization Manager is used by our Business Technology Engineering department staff members, which includes service desk engineers, project engineers, DBA engineers and Managers.
12
Skills around ESXi hosts and VMware vCenter are an absolute must. Skills around your companies storage solutions and an understanding are also key to you being able to administer VMAN.
  • 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.
We have been highly impressed with the fuctionality of VMAn since our purchase several months ago. Everytime a new member of staff views the module, they comment on how much data it provides and the ease of use. The capacity planning is invaluable to us and having such an in depth view of our VMs, hosts and clusters metrics allows us to get ahead of issues before they occur, thus reducing downtime and internal issues.
Yes
We have been using Nagios XI for the past 5 years. At the time we were fully on premise with basic storage. Over the past few years, our environment has scaled massively into a hybrid on premise and cloud based environment. We needed a solution that was going to provide full stack in a single pane of glass. Nagios has great capability if you have the development time, whereas as Virtualization Manager works out of the box with very little needed to get it working.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
  • Analyst Reports
  • Third-party Reviews
For my company, we needed a solution that would work out of the box with a clean interface and provide us with metrics we didnt have visibility with using our current solution. Features under a single plane of glass was the most important factor.
We reviewed multiple vendors before making a decision, and we also went through several proof of concepts. There isnt alot we would change as we believe we selected the correct solution for our requirements and everyone has been very impressed when using the platform.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes
We broke our implementation down into a phased approach. We began with our ESXi hosts, configuring SNMP and tidying them up. We then loaded all of the hosts and clusters into VMAN. We then focused on VMs and then finally the storage side of the VMware environment.
Change management was minimal
As this was a deployment, we did not need to engage change mangement very much. However, we did need to engage when reconfiguring our ESXi hosts ready for the deployment.
  • 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.
Implementation was smooth and easy. We already had Solarwinds installed due to purchasing the majority of the modules, including VMAN. Setting up our environment for the implementation was straight forward and and VMAN works so well out of the box that hardly any work is required to get the platform up and running.
  • Self-taught
Yes, very easy to learn without training, especially for engineers with key skills in VMware and Storage. If the latter is missing, then on boarding training and training classes would be a good idea.
There are over 60 widgets available once VMAN has been deployed. Not all of the metrics are useful, but the vast majority are and you can customize the widgets over multiple screens.
Try to seperate your ESXi hosts, VM and, Networking and Storage data on seperate tabs for ease of identifying issues.
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface
Very easy to customize the dashboards and screens.
No - we have not done any custom code
None.
We've had a few issues including one issue which is still on going. I've had to explain the issue multiple times and seem to end up having a different support member respond each time, which isnt great. I would prefer to have one engineer working on the same case. I've also had to escalate the issue through our account manager as it has dragged on and as a new customer, I feel more attention should be given at this stage.
No
During our proof of concept, support were excellent in responding to questions and giving us guidance.
  • 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.
Yes, but I don't use it
Usability wise, alot of the features just work out of the box with very little configuration needed. The interfaces and tag pages make browsing around very easy to achieve and of course you can search very easily. It provides a huge amount of detail under a single pane of glass.
Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.
We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.
We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.
  • We have integrated our entire VMware estate
Full integration and no difficulty to achieve really.
  • Not at this time.
We have no plans so we havent had to approach them about anything.
  • Javascript widgets
No, just whats listed above.
Very easy to integrate VMAN into an existing Orion installation and also very easy to install as strandalone.
Ensure the staff responsible have knowledge of planning and deployment of products of a similar nature. Also ensure they have key skills in VMware and Storage.
Very easy - the account manager we already knew from previous sales with Solarwinds products. He made sure all of our questions were answered and we had the support we needed.
Again, very easy. We speak to our account manager frequently.
As we were purchasing multiple modules, we were able to negotiate a large discount which allowed us to be in a position to afford the paltform.
Be polite and easy to work with!
Yes
Yes we have installed new versions since purchase. Process was smooth with very little downtime. No issues from the experience and we had backups available, just in case.
  • There were bug fixes in the recent upgrades, but nothing significant.
  • We're not aware of any major benefits or changes at this point.
No
No
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