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Monitoring, managing, and optimizing the virtual infrastructure can provide a variety of benefits for companies.
A great tool for this purpose is VMAN, a SolarWinds® proprietary Virtualization Management Software that helps users track, manage, and optimize their virtual environments.
Why Virtualization?
Regardless of your business size, when it comes to IT infrastructure, virtualization brings cost-effectiveness, ease of management, and freedom of scalability to technical operations.
It not only saves physical hardware-related costs but also makes it easier for the IT team to scale up or down their environment according to the requirements.
Virtual Machines are a popular computing option for those looking to merge their systems and keep up with a changing digital landscape.
The Main Benefits of Virtual Machine Management Software
Although Virtual Machines are fast, agile, and scalable, as they spread across a system, they sometimes become hard to manage. Users may have to search through the entire system even to find the root cause of a slowdown. Just like servers, firewalls, and other network devices, the monitoring of virtual machines is key. This way, users can reveal the root cause of performance issues. It speeds up troubleshooting by automating the most time-consuming processes and by making resource allocation more efficient.
To achieve the capabilities mentioned above, organizations need efficient Virtual machines management software, which covers every aspect related to Virtual environments including end-to-end monitoring, optimization, and managing resources.
Things to Consider While Choosing Virtual Machine Management Software
When it comes to selecting a Virtual environment management software, one should always look for a complete solution. A software that offers insight into the performance, usage, and capacity of the virtualized environment (including hosts, containers, clusters, vSANs, and other data stores), and also gives smart recommendations to optimize VM performance and resources.
The tool should be able to manage all the latest virtual environments such as Microsoft® Hyper-V, VMware® vSphere, Nutanix® AHV, on-premises, hybrid, and on the cloud.
It should have the capability to identify and notify about the issues related to the virtual environment and predict CPU, memory, storage, and other network needs of hypervisors.
VM Sprawl, a phenomenon that occurs when a VM is running idly in the background and eating up bandwidth, is something to be aware of. The selected software should be able to power off idle VMs and reclaim resources by deleting powered-off VMs and orphaned VMDK files.
The Key Capabilities of SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
SolarWinds® VMAN is a powerful enterprise-grade Virtualization management tool that enables users to do virtual machine monitoring, capacity planning, performance management, and optimization in a single pane of glass.
Here are some of the key capabilities of VMAN:
1. On-Premises and Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring: VMAN provides total visibility into VMware® vSphere, Nutanix® AHV, Microsoft® Hyper-V, Azure, and AWS infrastructure metrics. Clients can check how Virtual machines connect to applications, servers, and datastores.
2. Active alerts and Events: VMAN, has widgets that show all the active alerts related to the virtual environment and VMWare Events. This way, users do not need to go into the 'Alerts and Activity' menu and filter the alerts related to virtualization.
3. Recommendations: VMAN comes pre-configured with a Recommendations tool that provides active and predicted recommendations. Active recommendations are based on individual alerts and it helps users resolve current issues. By clicking on the recommendation and executing the command, suggestions can be implemented. Additionally, predicted suggestions can provide insights about the environment and how it can be configured to avoid future issues. Users can also reclaim resources based on these recommendations.
4. Summary Views: These views give an insight into different aspects of the Virtual environment. These are aspects, such as:
-Storage
-Sprawl
-Summaries showing critical metrics from all the clusters
-VMs powered off for more than 30 days
-Orphaned VMDKs
-VMs Idle from one week
-Top 10 lists for memory use and CPU use
-Top VMs by overallocated or under-allocated Memory, CPU
-Snapshots disks usage, etc.
5. Capacity Planning: A powerful tool that allows users to run checkups on the current virtual environment. Moreover, it gives a report based on different “What if” scenarios. For instance, “what would be the impact on resources if you add 5 new VMs or if you add an extra host”.
The tool also supports functions like selecting a time frame for your planning, picking a storage cluster, and creating a simulated profile.