Solarwinds Virtualization Manager

 Performance Management – Having good performance is critical in a virtual environment where the same resources are being shared by many virtual machines. Nothing can kill a virtual environment faster than not having adequate performance for all the virtual machines running in it. When virtual machines are all fighting for the limited host resources, you need to ensure that you not only have enough resources available but you also prioritize their usage. Staying on top of performance is one of the most important tasks in a virtual environment - if you don’t, you’re asking for trouble. Virtualization Manager can help you identify problem areas that can affect your performance to determine what resource areas are experiencing contentions. Through the use of dashboards, automated alerts and reports targeting the key areas that can impact performance,   Virtualization Manager can help ensure that your virtual environment performs well and stays healthy.

Capacity Planning – Maintaining sufficient capacity and planning for future growth is a non-stop job in a virtual environment. Knowing what resources to add when they are needed ensures that you always have enough capacity and are also not needlessly wasting money on resources that you do not need. Because resources are shared, capacity planning can be a tricky job; you need to think of your environment as a whole when adding capacity so you make sure you add the right type and amount of resources where needed.  

Virtualization Manager can help you understand when you will run out of resources and automatically notify you if you have a pending resource shortage. It can also help you with your host failover capacity planning to ensure that you always have enough spare capacity to handle host failures. You can also do advanced whatif analysis so you can create models of scenarios that will impact your resource availability. Finally, all VMs are not created equally, so understanding what applications and services these VMs support is critical so that you can set the right allocation priorities and make smart capacity management decisions. Surprises are not good in virtual environments and Virtualization Manager can help make sure that you never experience any.

VM Sprawl Identification – It’s not always easy to spot VM Sprawl, especially when you manage your virtual environment on a day-to-day basis where growth over time may not be easily noticeable. Monitoring VM lifecycles and growth patterns is critical to being able to identify VM Sprawl; in fact, it’s really about applying  best practice configuration management policies to your virtual environment as you have in your physical.  Looking at a picture of your environment from month-to-month instead of day-to-day can help you better understand how it is growing. Virtual environments hardly ever shrink and most continually grow from the  day they are implemented. Virtualization Manager can help monitor growth trends so you can understand  where your virtual environment has been and where it is going. With Virtualization Manager, you can easily identify un-used and zombie VMs as well as orphaned files and VMs that have more resources then they require.

Chargeback and Showback – Using chargeback and showback in a virtual environment can help you control its growth, as well as track resource consumption. Host resources all have a cost associated with them and it can be extremely difficult to determine what virtual machines are using what resources. Chargeback allows you to break out individual VM resource usage so you can see exactly what each VM is costing you in terms of resource usage. Virtualization Manager can help you provide a business perspective to your virtual environment so you can understand the business context of your resource usage. Using Virtualization Manager, you can   publish resource usage reports by business consumer so you can show what’s driving their IT costs. Additionally, you can use chargeback to help fight VM sprawl and ensure that all resource usage is truly relevant.