Skip to main content
TrustRadius
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.

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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

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 …
Continue reading
Read all 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

Return to navigation

Pricing

View all 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.

Return to navigation

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

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

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).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(123)

Community Insights

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

VMAN, a virtualization monitoring and troubleshooting tool, has proven to be an invaluable asset for customers in managing their virtualized environments. Users have relied on VMAN to monitor and alert on various aspects of their virtualized environment, such as disk space availability and newly created virtual machines - VMs. With VMAN, users have been able to identify issues with hosts and VM servers that are not visible in vSphere, providing deep insight beyond the capabilities of vSphere alone.

A key use case for VMAN is its ability to help users identify over or under provisioned VM servers and make resource adjustments as needed. The tool provides a single pane of glass view that includes storage and hardware information, giving users a complete view of their virtualized environment. This comprehensive view has allowed users to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation and upgrade planning.

Furthermore, VMAN has been instrumental in supporting IT operations teams in monitoring and managing virtual machines, ensuring proper resource allocation and identifying inactive VMs. It also assists in managing servers by providing important statistics, troubleshooting capabilities, and capacity planning. Through centralized alerting and troubleshooting across virtualization, server hardware, and network switching, VMAN empowers users to efficiently address performance issues and ensure smooth operation of their virtual infrastructure.

In addition to these core use cases, VMAN integrates seamlessly with other SolarWinds products, enabling users to monitor the entire virtualization structure and understand its impact on overall performance. This integration allows for proactive management of the environment by monitoring multiple sites and clusters.

Overall, VMAN simplifies the management of virtualized environments by providing deep insights into resource utilization, proactive monitoring capabilities, and streamlined troubleshooting. Its wide range of features has contributed to improved efficiency, reduced downtime, optimized resource allocation, and enhanced overall performance for many organizations.

Emailed alerts: Users have found the emailed alerts provided by VMAN to be fantastic, with multiple reviewers expressing their satisfaction. This feature allows users to stay informed about important events and issues related to their virtual infrastructure, ensuring prompt actions can be taken when necessary.

Customizable dashboards: The ability to customize dashboards has been highly regarded by users of VMAN. This functionality allows them to tailor the display of information according to their specific monitoring needs and preferences, providing a more personalized and efficient monitoring experience.

Comprehensive range of features: Reviewers have praised the comprehensive range of features offered by VMAN for virtual infrastructure monitoring. They appreciate that VMAN provides a wide variety of tools and capabilities such as capacity planning, performance management recommendations, configuration management, chargeback automation, and managing across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. This extensive feature set ensures that users have all the necessary resources at their disposal for effective virtual infrastructure management.

Licensing Cost: Several users have mentioned that the licensing process of SolarWinds is easy but costly, and they suggest that it could be improved to provide better value for money.

Setup Issues and Unhelpful Support: A number of users have experienced difficulties during the setup of SolarWinds, particularly with connecting to hosts and vCenters. They felt that the support team was unhelpful and only directed them to articles they had already read.

Navigation and Integration Challenges: Users have found the navigation in the VMAN console to be difficult and time-consuming, suggesting that it needs improvement. Additionally, there are ongoing issues with the lack of integration between VMAN and the main SolarWinds Orion console.

Users commonly recommend the following three suggestions for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager:

  1. Customize the product by taking advantage of customization options offered by a partner or SolarWinds to tailor the product to their specific needs. This allows users to optimize the functionality of Virtualization Manager and make it more aligned with their requirements.

  2. Utilize online training and community support by leveraging online training resources provided by SolarWinds and actively participating in the thwack community. These platforms offer valuable insights, best practices, and troubleshooting assistance from other users and experts, enhancing the overall experience with Virtualization Manager.

  3. Maintain VMs/hosts regularly by ensuring regular maintenance of virtual machines (VMs) and hosts. Staying on top of maintenance tasks such as updates, patches, and monitoring performance is crucial for maximizing the benefits of Virtualization Manager. By doing so, users can effectively manage their virtual infrastructure and achieve optimal results.

By implementing these recommendations, users can further enhance their usage of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and fully leverage its capabilities for their virtualization needs.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 65)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • VM snapshot reports.
  • Managing various clusters we have.
  • Flexibility on setting the reporting piece.
  • Overall, setup of the appliance was fairly straight forward.
  • Upgrading the appliance can be a pain at times.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Monitoring virtualization environments.
  • Identifying asset locations within the virtualization environment.
  • Identifying possible causes of problems within our entire environment.
  • Orion environment can at times be slow to load.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Auto discovery via VMAN.
  • Proactive monitoring of guest disk/ virtual disk.
  • It does predictions based on usage of VM resources.
  • Proactive VM status monitoring.
  • Snapshot monitoring is not good.
  • SolarWinds support assistance for customization is not good.
February 17, 2020

SolarWinds VM Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Network management.
  • Monitor wifi devices.
  • Sometimes when we upgrade the software we lose device access and have to restart it.
  • Wish there was more training.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Up through v7.1, a quick view of server (host and VM) performance and trends.
  • Through v7.1, it was everything we needed. Since then, the graphs that would harvest performance figures (network, memory, CPU, IOPS), would never display the same way, and would not refresh with the frequency to make the data digestible.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Single pane of glass
  • To be able to see VMware health/predictions of what is coming down the pike
  • Recommendations to improve the virtual environment
  • Sometimes there are glitches when updating the software
  • Free training videos
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
January 30, 2019

VMAN is the Man

Rob Bates | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Timothy Sawah | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • API intergration. Ease to integrate SolarWinds API to internal processes.
  • Syslog alerts are clear and easily read.
  • Ease to add Cisco devices to SVM.
  • Customisation choices.
  • SVM can be slow at times, e.g to view 2000 syslog messages of a device might take up to 30s to load.
  • Poor integration of Meraki devices and wireless data output in general.
Jez Marsh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
  • 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.
Ryhlen Schoeberl | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Dathon Stokes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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?
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to setup - you just need to give it credentials in order to discover your environment, and has many pre-programmed views which give you granular detail
  • Intuitive - fairly easy to play with and understand everything, however when needed there is very good documentation and support
  • Automation - you can set VMan to increase/decrease resources to VMs, based on their historical workload, and also move them to different hosts based on alerts from the rest of the Orion suite
  • Cost - it is fairly expensive, but has more features than comparable products
  • Cloud Support - would be nice to have the same granularity with Azure/AWS based VMs
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • We like the ease of adding our virtual environment to be managed. After a simple wizard, the Virtualization Manager imports the entire content of the vCenter and starts monitoring it.
  • Once machines have been detected, it's a snap to create alerts based on VM stats
  • Although machines can be added easily, these are seen from the hypervisor side, which means that it's not possible to monitor based on guest stats (Services, etc)
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Basic summary of VM environment (Total VM's, status of VM's, and any critical alerts).
  • Suggest recommendations about CPU or memory usage.
  • Displays a clean and simple interface for the admin to look at.
  • Perhaps more integration on apply recommendations from the console.
  • Provide more of an insight as to where a storage performance issue is at.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Monitoring the computing servers to get the health check and proactive alerts helps a lot in troubleshooting issues.
  • It's a one stop shop tool.
  • It really does magic with CISCO devices because it has very good compatibility with them.
  • It could be better if SolarWinds could do something with the grouping, dependencies and alerting part.
Austin Nickens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Snapshot Management - It was extremely easy to implement and set up this piece, it is nice to have an automated tool for cleaning up snapshots because this is often forgotten in the day to day.
  • Basic Automation - it has the capability to restart VMs or make additional changes automatically on the fly, although we have only just started using this piece I see potential in its future use.
  • Easy integration - Was very easy to setup, the service account gets access to vcenter and then you login, it only takes a few minutes without a lot of in depth knowledge of either platform.
  • Application Monitoring with Virtualization Manager - It isn't very simple to implement a specific application and tie it to a multitude of servers, you can set it up on a one to one basis but you would have to do it individually per vm.
  • Virtualization Manager & Nodes - Nodes and VMs are treated differently in Solarwinds, even if you add a VM as a node, while it gives you different options for each, there is not a lot of cross over and we find that even when muting VMs/Nodes alerts still go through or get triggered
  • Weird Objects - there are some random objects that have appeared over time in our virtualization manager page, hosts, vms, that don't exist. There doesn't seem to be an easy way of removing them and I dont know where they came from. It is more of an annoyance than an actual issue but it flags false positives
Return to navigation