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Great starting tool but not not the best for automation
September 28, 2018

Great starting tool but not not the best for automation

Austin Nickens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

We currently use Virtualization Manager for maintenance and some basic levels of automation. On the maintenance side we use it to clean up old snapshots and send Slack notifications to our channels of impending removal. We just implemented checks for the VMs in vCenter, specifically our DHCP servers, and it will automatically reboot the VM if it detects issues. This also sends Slack notifications and escalates before paging our IT team if the simple reboot doesn't fix the issue.
  • 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
  • Snapshot Management - It is nice to have an automated tool for cleaning up snapshots because this is often forgotten in the day to day. One of those things that no one wants to do themselves
  • VM Management - we are still getting started with this but we keep finding it coming up a little short on exactly what we need, it will do most of the job we need but still requires some manual intervention.
At the time it met most of the requirements we had, easy to implement and gave us more insight into our current environment than we had prior to implementing it. Previously we monitored our hosts and VMs individually but this allowed us to see our entire environment on one page.
It is great if you need a quick and fast solution, it is more of a Swiss Army Knife of monitoring tools, it does a lot of things, but if you really want to go in depth on something or get a certain amount of details it can be cumbersome. Sometimes the level of effort can be really low but it could also be really high; snapshot management was a big win and was very easy to implement. Management groups of VMs or nodes get more complicated even if it is a fleet of similar VMs that provide the same function, you are limited to the capabilities of Virtualization Manager. It doesn't allow for a lot of automation that we are looking to implement, we are looking to rebuild our VMs on the fly, utilize containerization, etc and this doesn't have enough functionality for this need.