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SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, nee Hyper9, is in eWEEK Labs and the results thus far are positive. So far I’ve gotten a wealth of performance reports and planning recommendations for the Labs VMware vSphere testing environment.
As of today, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (SVM) is VMware-only, no Microsoft Hyper-V or Xen support. SVM is priced for modest-sized organizations ($2995 to watch over up to 50 virtual machines) but there’s a chance that IT managers at large organizations could benefit from using the tool. It’s wicked easy to install (it comes as a no-muss, no-fuss virtual appliance) and can scale out using additional virtual appliances called federated collection servers at physically separated data centers. And the quality of the data I’ve collected in our test installation is revealing (much easier to consume than combing through the vCenter records) and neatly presented.
There are a number of interesting new features in SVM and I’ll cover those in an upcoming eWEEK product review. For now, the one I’m having the most fun playing with is the capacity manager.
I have an ongoing interest in figuring out what would happen if one of the ESX hosts in our test environment failed. Would there be enough room on the other physical hosts to keep our VMs up and running? Would the storage or network I/O kill the surviving physical subsystems?
The answers for the Lab infrastructure are not good. We are using most of our systems at near maximum capacity according to one or another measure, usually RAM. The nice thing is that SVM makes it easier for me to see what resources to add, in terms of compute, storage or networking, to ease the bottleneck.
Now if I could just get the budget to put those recommendations into practice. :)