SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Reviews

We predominantly work with financial organizations such as large banks, stock exchanges, and insurance companies, as well as IT-enabled services (ITES). I use SolarWinds Virtualization Manager at our customer's place for optimizing virtual environments.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization. It provides me with recommendations for resource allocation, indicating if a virtual machine is under-provisioned or over-provisioned. This allows me to reclaim resources, such as reducing the number of CPU cores or RAM, which is beneficial. Its capacity planning feature is also very useful for me. The GUI is highly simplified, cutting across various virtualization platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix environments.

The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing. The solution can be made free, especially for those who are using Dell products. The monitoring part is taken care of after SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is integrated into Dell IDRAC. If the aforementioned integration is not carried out, then you have to pay money separately to receive or utilize the services from SolarWinds.

In the future, the product should have reporting features. The reporting feature would allow users to get whatever information they are looking for rather than having to do it manually.

I have been using SolarWinds Virtualization Manager for a few years. Though I don't directly use the solution, I manage it. I am a user of the solution.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is used for to virtualization of servers.  The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is only a module of the larger solution which supports a different type of operating system that it supports.

The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning. 

The cluster monitoring is simple. You can mention the cluster IP and all the sub-servers under the cluster would populate and you can receive more information.

The primary use case for Solarwinds Virtualization Manager was it's ability to monitor/measure VM level IOPS which allowed us to do manual storage tiering with our Dell EqualLogic SAN's.

We were able to leverage this product for Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) free space monitoring and alerting based on customized thresholds which we were unable to do before without the use of custom PowerShell scripts. It also allows for more granular VM level monitoring that can be beneficial, i.e. Disk level metrics (IOPS, Read/Write Mbps, Queue Depth), Network level metrics (Bandwidth In/out, errors/discards), etc. This can be especially useful if you're looking to put in a Tiered Storage solution in the future or looking to implement Storage and/or Network QoS.

The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value. The trends help me when I am looking at how my VMs are performing.

There are times when we need more performance out of certain VMs. With trends and capacity planning, you can really focus on the items and help get a better picture of how you can move things around to streamline your infrastructure.

The Recommendations are a life saver. They have valuable, daily information regarding your VM network. I don’t always follow the recommendations but when I do, it’s usually automated, so there is no other interaction needed from me. It’s like having another employee.

The diagnostics simply help me make sure I am meeting my required KPIs.

VMAN recommendations have helped us manage the VMs to perform more efficiently. It notes everything from storage to processor utilizations. It helps us, in the organization, to make informed decisions about whether or not we need to expand the infrastructure. This saves us time and money.

Alerting expands, and makes, our monitoring and management much more efficient. Also, the ability to see into our virtual world quickly and easily is a great benefit. Dashboards are customizable providing at a glance information that’s extremely helpful.

From an IT perspective, it makes admin work much more efficient since we can go to one tool for a good percentage of the data needed on a day to day basis for monitoring and report on that data over time.

Virtualization manager’s cost analysis comparison report identified areas in which specific customers were being grossly undercharged for their resource consumption levels, as compared to rates available through AWS. Being able to pull up an itemized cost analysis anchored in real-world pricing was an asset when renegotiating contracts and adjusting rates.

Out of the box support for a wider array of hardware vendor/device-specific SNMP mibs could be improved upon.