IT Management - eWeek


IT Management: SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Uses VM Performance to Estimate Amazon EC2 Costs

By Cameron Sturdevant on 2011-06-27


The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 4.0 tracks compute, network and storage resource use to predict capacity limits, answers “what-if” planning questions and estimates what it would cost to run your VMware virtual infrastructure on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud service. The tool does not monitor or manage Microsoft Hyper-V or open source hypervisor platforms. The reminted Virtualization Manager (VM) neatly fits with SolarWinds network and system management tools. Tests at eWEEK Labs showed that VM is well worth adding to any sized organizations management toolkit. SolarWinds VM started shipping on June 7 and is available as a virtual appliance. The product costs $2,995 for 50 powered on VMs under management.

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Estimate

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager uses performance data and cost templates to estimate what it would cost to run VMware virtual infrastructure on Amazon Web Services EC2 platform.

Dashboard

The dashboard view can be configured with a wide variety of widgets including some shown here that track VMware cluster capacity.

Configure

The configuration summary shows that we are running 7 powered on VMs, which is how SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is licensed.

Completed

Reports can be scheduled, run and then downloaded for distribution.

Content

A wide variety of factors can be tracked and used as the basis of reports.

VM CPU Utilization

This report shows virtual machine utilization by resource pool in our test VMware vSphere infrastructure.

Before

Using Time Travel I can see that we had a VMware cluster with no resources on 6/23.

After

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager correctly tracked the addition of resources to our test VMware environment including two physical hosts and twenty-two virtual machines.

Not the Only Game in Town

Here are the native performance indicators supplied by VMware vCenter. While there are many niceties in the SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, it’s not the only way to get performnace statistics. This slide also show our test environment in a format that is likely more familiar to VMware operators.

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