Trying to wrangle your private cloud environment? Never send a child to do the work of a VMAN!
July 01, 2019
Trying to wrangle your private cloud environment? Never send a child to do the work of a VMAN!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
Building a consolidated view of the infrastructure that supports your virtualized environment is hard. App owners blame the OS. The OS admins blame the DBAs. The DBAs always blame storage. Everyone blames the network team. And, when all else fails, they blame virtualization. VMAN stitches together a consolidated view of your environment and let's you do it without investing in additional tools from VMware. Using the SolarWinds Orion authentication, you can even give non-admin users views and access to your environment through a single interface.
- 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.
- VMAN is expensive. Make sure you aren't duplicating existing functionality, especially if you have enterprise licensing from your virtualization solution
- VMAN + AppStack is a match made in heaven, but neither AppStack nor VMAN has an out-of-the-box view of your network -- but you can always build one!
- Adding other modules from the SolarWinds Orion platform is part of the secret sauce that makes the Orion environment work so well
In our experience, the market for exemplary tools for managing a VMware environment is pretty small. Either go with the VMware tools, which may or may not be part of your enterprise licensing, or use a 3rd-party platform. If you have a multi-vendor environment (say VMware + HyperV) and/or have to support a series of other solutions (network, storage, databases, etc.) then using VMAN is the right choice.
If you are running OpenStack or if you have a significant Cloud presence, VMAN isn't going to help solve your visibility challenges with your multi-site, multi-vendor, multi-platform environment.
If you are running OpenStack or if you have a significant Cloud presence, VMAN isn't going to help solve your visibility challenges with your multi-site, multi-vendor, multi-platform environment.