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SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an perceptive tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization. It included resolve issues with vSphere and Hyper-V units in a few minutes to ensure that system experiences less downtime. Aside from providing with optimization recommendations, the solution also offers proactive alerts that aid assessing the virtual machine’s state and in improving its functions.
Virtualization is a scalable computing solution to help reduce IT costs, increase productivity and agility, and enable more automated processes. However, managing virtual machines can come with challenges. A single virtual server environment can contain numerous virtual machines operating simultaneously on a single computer. With so many moving parts, how can you pinpoint what’s causing virtual machine performance issues? Virtual machine performance management is a strategy used to gather health and status metrics from across your virtual instances.
Features
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager provides multi-hypervisor alerting and remediation in a single
pane of glass. Troubleshoot virtual issues faster with intuitive dashboards for performance,
capacity, storage, and configuration. Save virtual resources and cut down hardware costs with
VM Sprawl and VM rightsizing. VMAN also provides configuration management, and alert
remediation. All these features are combined into one product that is easy to download, deploy,
and use.
Virtual Machine Performance Management
Gain insight into virtual server performance with intuitive and comprehensive dashboards
SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) dashboards are built to show virtual server performance for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. VMAN is designed to provide environment views capable of automatically mapping virtual machines (VMs) to their underlying host, storage, and related objects, allowing you to quickly see virtual server performance correlations.
The detailed alerts in VMAN can also give you hypervisor-specific conditions, thresholds, and custom recommendations to fix problems plus status alerts about your physical host to let you analyze overall hardware health.
Eliminate bottlenecks with storage I/O performance metrics and alerts
Storage I/O performance is a common cause of bottlenecks in both vSphere and Hyper-V environments. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is designed to give you a comprehensive view of all shared storage via a single pane of glass.
The customizable dashboards built in VMAN can provide critical storage metrics, such as read/write, IOPs, throughput, and more. Storage contention issues can also be viewed at cluster, host, and virtual machine levels, so you can address them at the right time to better avoid application performance issues.
Use past performance analysis to speed up troubleshooting
The virtualization dependency mapping feature in VMAN is designed to provide a visual overview of related objects, helping streamline your virtual server monitoring.
Additionally, the time travel feature in SolarWinds VMAN can offer a historical account of configuration data and infrastructure relationships to help you identify what dependencies existed at a specific time in your virtual server environment, such as VMs belonging to a host seven days ago. This data can be used to answer the “What changed?” question all IT pros regularly face.
Use virtual server monitoring recommendations to manage and optimize virtual resources
The out-of-the-box virtual server monitoring tools in VMAN are built to offer optimization strategies for managing your virtual resources overall. You can use the integrated Sprawl Dashboard, Recommendations, and Capacity Planning tools to evaluate VM usage, rebalance allocation, pinpoint sprawl, and eliminate rogue VMs.
The active recommendations provided by VMAN can also help you resolve VM issues as they occur, while predictive recommendations use historical trends to help anticipate and prepare for upcoming virtual server performance and capacity issues.
Investigate virtual server performance issues with precision virtual machine monitoring tools
SolarWinds PerfStack™ and AppStack™ dashboards are also available for use with VMAN virtual machine monitoring tools to help you drill down deeper into performance issues. PerfStack compares and analyzes multiple metrics across several products at once to provide a visual, historical timeline. AppStack graphically represents monitored nodes in a custom map, allowing for quick visual scans of VM statuses, plus one-click drill-down into node details. Combining these tools can help provide more comprehensive virtual machine performance management.
Virtual Machine (VM) Capacity Planning and Management Tool
Powerful VM capacity planning tools
SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) includes a VM capacity planning feature designed to help you predict CPU, memory, network, and storage needs for your Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere environments.
By using current VM growth and resource constraints stats, you can more easily determine hardware purchase needs. Use VMAN to model future server and hardware additions to see if your environment can scale to meet workload needs. With VMAN, it’s easy to view consumption trends to determine resource warning and outage dates, or you can customize the sample timeframe to create individual capacity plans for peak or non-peak usage.
Test virtualization capacity with modeling scenarios
The virtualization capacity planning feature in VMAN allows you to run what-if modeling scenarios, such as accessing existing virtual machines and host usage to see the effects of a host or multiple hosts going down.
You can also use VMAN virtual machine monitoring to help determine whether your virtual machine will run smoothly or not, see what resources could experience a bottleneck in the event of a device failure, and determine the effect on your environment if additional hosts or resources are added. Overall, VMAN helps you understand how to load balance your environment for better VM performance and capacity efficiency.
Optimize VM placement and VM capacity
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager offers a Hyper-V capacity planning tool to determine the best location for virtual machines. The tools in Virtualization Manager are built to average resource by clusters and compare cluster-by-cluster resource constraints, which can help determine the ideal location for future workload placement. Other built-in VM performance visualizations, like scatterplot graphs, can show you IOPS and latency for current VMs, providing accurate storage expectations for future workloads.
VM Sprawl Control
Reclaim wasted resources
Frequent creation of VMs leads to VM proliferation. Over time, many VMs turn stale and continue to consume virtual resources. Increase storage capacity by deleting VMs that are not powered on for a long time. These VMs tend to consume storage space without actively using CPU and memory. Further, you need to investigate VMs that are idle and have high co-stop percentages for resource contention and performance issues. You can reclaim disk space by deleting VMs with high snapshot disk usage. Also, you can check VM sprawl by reclaiming the wasted resources.
Right-size your VMs
Right-sizing VMs is a necessary action to control VM sprawl. It also makes it easier to maintain optimal CPU and memory configurations. You can right-size VMs that are under- or over-allocated with resources (vCPU, memory) to improve performance. Using a virtualization monitoring tool, you can perform sprawl management tasks such as add/remove CPU, add/remove RAM, and delete VMs, without logging into vCenter.
Remove orphaned VMDK files
Orphaned VMDK files are virtual hard disks, which remain in the virtual infrastructure even after the associated VMs have been deleted. These orphaned VMDK files consume usable disk space, which will lead to resource contention issues. Using a virtualization management tool, you can identify and delete these files instantly to free up the usable disk space, without logging in to vCenter.
Virtual Machine Recommendations
Recommendations to fix active performance issues
Virtualization Manager has built-in, actionable intelligence that provides recommendations to optimize your VMware, vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Detailed recommendations alert you to specific performance problems and include the ability to execute the fix. Recommendations may generate a multi-step fix to achieve the optimal performance state and relieve CPU, memory, and storage contention.
Predictive recommendations to prevent future issues
Predicated recommendations can help you proactively prevent performance issues from occurring. Prevent and prepare for the future state of your VMs and workloads. CPU, memory, and storage trends are calculated using historical data to provide performance degradation dates and outages. Predicated recommendations help ensure that your VM resource configuration is optimal for patterned usage spikes, such as EOD, EOW, and EOM.
Optimal VM placement to distribute VM workloads
Optimal VM placement is key for VM resource growth and usage spikes. VM placement recommendations work by distributing your VMs, CPU, memory, and storage patterned max usage across your host and storage devices. Understanding a VM’s current usage and predictive spike usage allows for less VM movement between hosts and storage devices once optimally placed.
Ability to schedule recommendations and fixes
Some VM resource changes require a reboot and migrating storage can degrade performance during the move. Making such changes during business hours tends to exacerbate the problem. Having the ability to schedule recommendations and their fixes allows these changes to take place during non-peak or maintenance windows.
Application Stack Management: Pinpoint the Root Cause of Application Problems in Seconds
Highlight all relevant elements across the application stack
Discover and troubleshoot application issues like never before. The AppStack dashboard shows you all performance information across the application stack with relationships between various elements of your environment.
Consolidated monitoring insights
Consolidate data generated by your multi-vendor infrastructure under control with a unified application stack management dashboard and automated infrastructure mappping software that provides deep insight in a single pane of glass.
Pinpoint the root cause
With the AppStack dashboard, you can quickly pinpoint the root cause of application issues within physical and virtual server environments. Choose any application or infrastructure and display the status of connected applications and infrastructure.
Benefits
Predictive Optimization
Aside from helping you plan to accommodate the requirements of your resources in the future, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager also assists you in ensuring that your virtual machines are in top performing condition. With its optimization recommendations, you can optimize your systems with a single click. You can even choose to run them immediately or schedule them at a much later date and time. Whichever you prefer, you can look forward to a smooth-running virtualization for the future.
Reduced Downtime
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager regularly serves you with active virtualization alerts. These can be simply informational or they can be action-driven that require responses. These allow you to gain constant updates regarding your system without drilling down to your management dashboards. Such alerts can also save you time and resources as they immediately notify you of issues and help you solve them before they become problems.
Increased Resource Control
Idle, powered-off, and orphaned VMs and files take up huge amounts of resources that degrade performance and negatively affect your operation. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager aids you in finding them to turn them off or delete them completely. Once these actions are done, you can expect to reclaim precious resources and return them to the virtual pool.
PerfStack Dashboard
Other than its management dashboards, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager has what it calls the PerfStack Dashboard. This feature enables you to interact with your metrics by dragging, dropping, and overlaying them for easier comparison.
New features and improvements in VMAN
Released November 5, 2019
In VMAN 2019.4, you can now add a Nutanix cluster and begin basic Nutanix monitoring.
In VMAN and SAM 2019.4, you can now monitor virtual machines and hosts that are managed through Nutanix. Nutanix monitoring functionality is currently in development and is provided in this release as a technical preview. Nutanix monitoring is limited in scope, so not everything works yet, but it includes fully functional features such as Hardware Health monitoring and AppStack as well as basic Nutanix monitoring and alert support.
FIRST PUBLISHED DATE
11/5/2019 6:13 AM
LAST PUBLISHED DATE
1/23/2020 10:27 PM
Add Nutanix clusters to monitor Nutanix-managed hosts and virtual machines
Get started with Nutanix monitoring by using the Add Node Wizard in the Orion Web Console to directly add a Nutanix cluster.
Fully supported Nutanix hardware health monitoring
Get full Hardware Health monitoring for any host associated with Nutanix clusters and AHV hosts that you’ve added for monitoring. Know at a glance that everything is working, and see clearly when and where there’s a possible hardware issue. Hardware Health monitoring for Nutanix is supported by SAM and VMAN.
Fully supported AppStack for monitored Nutanix clusters
Gain insight into your Nutanix environment with a full AppStack for your Nutanix clusters, hosts, and virtual machines. See the status of servers, virtual clusters, datastores, and more. When needed, you can use AppStack as a troubleshooting tool to drill down into your Nutanix infrastructure to investigate and track down issues.
Basic support for alerts for monitored Nutanix clusters
Create alerts on the hardware health of your Nutanix clusters or the up/down status of monitored Nutanix entities and integrate with ServiceNow or Service Desk.
Nutanix monitoring caveats and limitations
Nutanix Prism Central – Adding a Prism Central server in VMAN or SAM is not yet supported. You must add Nutanix clusters to begin monitoring.
Nutanix cluster and AHV hosts – Add a Nutanix cluster with the Add Node Wizard to monitor up/down status of the cluster. AHV hosts related to the cluster are added automatically as ICMP nodes, enabling full hardware health monitoring and AppStack functionality for AHV hosts.
Note: To fully enable hardware health monitoring functionality for AHV hosts, you need to set up and provide Nutanix CVM credentials. Additional metrics gathering beyond up/down status or management functionality for AHV hosts is currently not implemented.
Nutanix cluster and Hyper-V hosts – Add a Nutanix cluster with the Add Node Wizard to monitor up/down status of the cluster. Hyper-V hosts managed as part of the cluster are added automatically as ICMP nodes, enabling full hardware health monitoring and AppStack functionality for Hyper-V hosts.
Note: To enable full VMAN metrics gathering and management functionality for Hyper-V hosts, each host must be added separately with the Add Node Wizard as a Hyper-V host.
Nutanix cluster and vCenters/ESX hosts – Add a Nutanix cluster with the Add Node wizard to monitor up/down status of the cluster.
Note: To enable hardware health monitoring, full AppStack functionality, full VMAN metrics gathering, and management functionality for vCenters and ESX hosts, vCenters and hosts must be added separately with the Add Node Wizard.
Important: SolarWinds recommends adding vCenters and ESX hosts before adding the associated Nutanix cluster. If you add a vCenter/ESX host after adding the Nutanix cluster, you must restart the SolarWinds Information Service, SolarWinds Cortex, and SolarWinds Orion Module Engine services with the Orion Service Manager.
Note: The default port for the Nutanix API is 9440; the SSH port is 22.
New features and improvements in Orion Platform 2019.4
New version numbering
Orion Platform products now follow a new, consistent naming structure. VMAN 2019.4 is part of the Orion Platform 2019.4 release.
Support for new languages
Orion Platform products are now localized to German and Japanese. You can choose the language during a fresh install of an Orion server.
The basic shared virtualization monitoring functionality available to NPM, SAM, and VMAN has been localized. However, the full-fledged VMAN product is not yet fully localized.
Orion Log Viewer
Orion Log Viewer is now included as an optional add-on during installation or upgrade for all Orion products. Orion Log Viewer was previously included with VMAN as part of the optional VMware Events Add-on.
Support for Azure SQL Managed Instance
You can now use the Azure SQL Managed Instance deployment option for your Orion database.
Orion Maps improvements
Orion Maps 2019.4 allows users to customize their maps with personalized images and enhancements, multi-select and reconfigure groups of entities on the canvas at one time, and quickly identify contextual relationships between entities from the entity library without leaving the Orion Maps Editor.
System Requirements
These system requirements define the minimum requirements for VMAN 2019.4 and its integration with the Orion Platform as a single installed product.
VMAN and the Orion Platform system requirements
Review the following requirements for Virtualization Manager in the Orion Platform. Install Virtualization Manager with the Orion Installer.
Before you install or upgrade VMAN with the Orion Installer, make sure the Orion Platform server meets the following requirements.
Do not install Orion Platform products on the same server as SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM).
| Software or Hardware | Requirement | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating System |
|
||
| CPU | 3.0 GHz | ||
| Memory | 8 GB
Recommendations also requires an additional 8 GB. |
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| HDD | 20 GB (up to 3000 virtual machines)
30 GB (up to 6000 virtual machines) 40 GB (up to 10 000 virtual machines) If you have more than 3000 virtual machines, SolarWinds recommends adding an APE with the same specifications as the Main Polling Engine for each 3000 VMs. |
||
| .NET Framework | .NET 4.8
VMAN downloads and installs the latest required version of the .NET Framework, if it is missing. Save time during the VMAN installation by installing .NET Framework beforehand. |
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| SQL Server | SQL Server 2017
SQL Server 2016 SP1 SQL Server 2016 SQL Server 2014 SP1 SQL Server 2014 Azure SQL Database If you’re also installing the Orion Log Viewer to enable VMware Events Monitoring functionality, your database must be upgraded to SQL Server 2016 SP1 or newer with full text search configured. If you need to update your Orion server’s version of Windows Server or SQL Server, see the migration guide for Orion Platform products.
|
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| Browser | Internet Explorer version 11 and Edge
Mozilla Firefox two latest versions Google Chrome two latest versions |
Port requirements
VMAN requires the basic server port requirements needed for the Orion server.
In addition, VMAN requires port 17799 (Inbound and outbound) to support Container service monitoring in order to communicate with container orchestrators.
VMAN appliance system requirements
The following information is valid for existing VMAN installations using the VMAN appliance.
As of VMAN 8.0, VMAN is now part of the Orion Platform out of the box. The appliance is no longer required for VMAN installations. New users do not need to install the VMAN appliance. Existing users who use the appliance can choose to retire the appliance or continue using the appliance by upgrading it separately, then integrating it with the Orion Platform.
If you’re using the VMAN appliance, the appliance must be installed on a VM that meets the following requirements:
| Software or Hardware | Requirement | |||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virtualization software | VMware vSphere 5.x or later
VMware ESX or ESXi 5.x or later, managed or unmanaged hosts VMware vCenter 6.5 VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 6.5
Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2016 Virtualization Manager only supports the default, English localization of Hyper-V. |
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| CPU | 2 GHz quad-core | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Virtual CPUs | 4 vCPUs | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Memory | 8 GB or more.
Review the following scaling memory recommendations based on monitored ESX hosts and VMs:
|
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| Disk space | 200 GB or more recommended.
At the default collection interval, a virtualized environment containing 1000 VMs and 100 hosts requires 40 GB of storage during the first month, and an additional 60 GB of storage over the next five years.
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| Virtual NIC | 1 Gigabit vNIC |
Port requirements
The following ports are required for the VMAN appliance.
As of VMAN 8.0, VMAN is now part of the Orion Platform out of the box. The appliance is no longer required for VMAN installations. New users do not need to install the VMAN appliance. Existing users who use the appliance can choose to retire the appliance or continue using the appliance by upgrading it separately, then integrating it with the Orion Platform.
Inbound ports on the master appliance:
| Inbound port | Usage |
|---|---|
| 443 or 80 | Performing auto-upgrade or version upgrade on federated collectors, if federated collectors are configured. |
| 8983 | Access from federated collectors to the master appliance during initial setup. |
| 443 | HTTPS access to the VMAN user interface. |
| 5480 | HTTPS access to the Management Console. |
| 61616 | Active MQ master-collector communication. |
| 22 | SSH access to the virtual appliance. |
Outbound ports on the master appliance:
| Outbound port | Usage |
|---|---|
| 162 | Sending SNMP traps. |
| 25 | Sending emails through SMTP. |
| 389 | Active Directory authentication. |
| 3268 | LDAP authentication. |
| 17778 | Communication with the SolarWinds Orion server if the integration with Orion is enabled.
If you use Virtualization Manager integrated with NPM or SAM in an environment with multiple polling engines and federated collectors, open TCP port 17778 from the primary collector to every polling engine that is used to poll virtualization data. |
| 123 | Using the NTP service. |
Plan for an evaluation installation
The evaluation version of VMAN is a full version of the product, functional for 30 days. After the evaluation period, you can easily convert your evaluation license to a production license by obtaining and applying a license key. The VMAN license supports the integration with the Orion Platform.
Installing the evaluation version requires the same requirements, installation steps, and configurations as the full licensed version:
- The VMAN evaluation can be integrated with an existing Orion Platform environment
- The existing environment must have a full or evaluation version of Network Performance Monitor (NPM), Sever & Application Monitor (SAM), or Network Configuration Manager (NCM) installed
- Create or modify accounts and permissions as required for VMAN
- For evaluations only, you can install on systems with the following OS versions:
| Evaluation and production environments | Evaluation environments only |
|---|---|
| Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2016 |
Windows 8.1 (except Standard edition)
Windows 8.1 Update 1 (except Standard edition) Windows 10 |