SolarWinds VMAN Review - A service provider perspective.
October 19, 2018
SolarWinds VMAN Review - A service provider perspective.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
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.
- Every business I have worked with who have adopted VMAN has seen an efficiency improvement. This means that they are able to run more guests on the same hardware, leading to an increased time before requiring further CAPEX for additional capacity.
- Performance benefits, via heeding the recommendations within VMAN, are not to be underestimated. Once VMAN has enough metrics on your estate, it can quickly advise you which guests need more compute, but more importantly which ones are over-provisioined, and can have CPU/memory reduced! This leads to increased capacity.