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.
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vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS), discontinued
Score 7.0 out of 10
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VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS) is an automated operations management solution that provides integrated performance, capacity, and configuration management for highly virtualized and cloud infrastructure. The product is currently discontinued.
[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].
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.
Resources allocation estimates are amazing, this feature allowed us to increase density on our hosts by reclaiming RAM and CPU from over allocated VMs letting us increase the amount of VMs per host. The report was very clear and easy to understand.
The planing feature enabled us to gather all the info we needed to plan hardware purchases as it showed us, with our current rate of deployment, when we would reach capacity in or environment.
The heat maps provided excellent drill down capabilities allowing for proactively resolving potential issues.
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
It would be nice to be able to make configuration changes either directly in vCenter Operations Manager or have it link back to the correct locations in vCenter.
Critical component for companies ability to maintain services both customer facing as well as internal systems. Without insight into our VM estate provided by VMAN outage duration as well as frequency would increase to unacceptable levels. VMAN has allowed us to consolidate multiple monitoring mechanisms into one, as part of the Orion suite providing us with 1 solution. This has the added benefit of enabling our engineers to focus on learning 1 solution oppose to multiple solutions, meaning we're able to handle administration and support of our monitoring across the whole company alot more efficiently from a time spent resource as well as savings on costings.
SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
Pretty straighforward, as long as you check Solarwinds site for recommended installation path. KEY ITEM - be sure that you know which versions of all SolarWinds products you are using, because there are incompatability issues between versions for many products. It took me about 2 hours with a spreadsheet to figure out an upgrade path. Don't assume that the version you downloaded is the right/most current version without checking first!
To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to offer as well as having it integrate into our already existing SolarWinds SAM environment.
SolarWinds as an overall tool is much more flexible. It allows you to perform tasks based on events, whereas the vCenter Operations Manager monitors your environment. SolarWinds costs more.
VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.
+Helped us identify a performance issue where our cluster was under-sized. We were able to order new hosts to bring performance in-line with expectations.
+Saved us from purchasing a third-party monitoring tool.
