Oct 31, 2013 - Today's virtualization administrator has a plethora or storage options to consider. ... SolarWinds® Virt
An ActualTech Media Property
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review October 31, 2013
View Online Version
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
For all intents and purposes, the hypervisor has become the bare metal of the data center. When administrators make decisions as to how to support workloads, they are planning ways to carve resources from the overall virtual environment. Rarely are these administrators building complete physical server environments to support new applications. More than ever before, the ability to constantly shuffle resources around has enabled IT work toward taking a more application-centric view of the data center, rather than a view based on server count. Of course, such shuffling and resource reconfiguration has the potential to create capacity issues in the virtual environment.
The Virtualization Train Continues to Gain Speed As the trend toward virtualizing more and bigger workloads and application-centricity has accelerated, so has the beginning of a fracturing of VMware’s grip on the hypervisor market. Microsoft’s Hyper-V is proving to be a solid and capable contender and, while the overall virtualization market continues to grow, VMware’s share of that market is dwindling. In other words, vSphere isn’t the only kid on the block anymore and tools that are used around the hypervisor need to learn to play nice with others. At the same time as the world of the hypervisor splinters, organizations need to ensure that their IT environments are as normalized as reasonable in order to provide efficient service and to best achieve change management goals. While there has been significant forward momentum in many areas of IT, storage is currently undergoing its own renaissance of sorts. Today’s virtualization administrator has a plethora or storage options to consider. There are solutions that can slot into just about any part of the data center stack. Of course, these new solutions still require active management. The comingling of so many different trends has brought with it much greater comfort with higher levels of reliance on the virtual environment overall, but it has also brought about a major need for new and better ways to make sure that IT organizations are meeting their availability and performance objectives when it comes to supporting critical business workloads in this ever-changing paradigm. That’s just a way of saying that now, more than ever, IT departments need to inject into their organizations comprehensive monitoring tools that can watch over, at a minimum, key potential pain points, and, if possible, ensure that mission critical business applications remain available and capable or meeting performance expectations. As environments have grown ever more complex and various levels of abstraction have entered
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
1
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
the equation, ensuring ongoing availability and performance has sometimes been a real challenge for administrators.
Introducing SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 With the release of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 6.0, SolarWinds has brought to the market the latest generation of a product which the company claims provides “Comprehensive Virtualization Management – From VM to Spindle.” SolarWinds goes on to say the following: SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager delivers integrated VMware® and Microsoft® Hyper-V® capacity planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, VDI performance monitoring, configuration management, and chargeback automation – all in one awesomely affordable product that’s easy to download, deploy, and use. How well does the product stack up against these claims and how well does the product meet some of the needs identified earlier in this review? The first couple of points are really easy to nail down. I was able to download and deploy a SolarWinds Virtualization Manager appliance in mere minutes with no hassle. I chose to deploy to a vSphere cluster, so I downloaded Virtualization Manager for VMware. SolarWinds also makes available Virtualization Manager for HyperV, which, as one would guess, can be deployed to Hyper-V environments. It’s important to note that, regardless of which appliance you download, the resulting installation can manage both Hyper-V and vSphere environments. Logging into Virtualization Manager and pointing it to a vCenter instance for statistics gathering was also an easy task. However, in the interest of completeness, the remainder of this review is based on SolarWinds public demo of Virtualization Manager, available here.
First Things First Figure 1 gives you a look at the first view you see when you log into Virtualization Manager. This is a view that I believe that SolarWinds has done extremely well in that it provides an administrator with an immediate look at items in the environment that require attention. No longer do administrators have to wade through mazes of information; everything is front and center.
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
2
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Figure 1.0 Let’s drill down into one of the alerting areas. To get started, it’s possible to just hover the mouse over an alert to get more information about that item, as shown in Figure 2. However, given that there are five such alerts and possible hundreds of virtual machines, you need more detail.
Figure 2.0 For that, simply click the alert to open a view that displays a list of the virtual machines that were falling victim to VM CPU ready issues.
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
3
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Figure 3.0 Let’s try to get more detail about what’s going on with the virtual machine named stp-2k8-xiv-1. Virtualization Manager can provide administrators with a contextual view of the alert, which shows the current alert in context with its place in the hierarchy. To open this view, click the little hierarchy button next to the orange plus sign. This view, shown in Figure 4, enables an administrator to see what issues may be contributing to this situation without having to try to manually recreate the context. In this view, it becomes apparent that the host on which this virtual machine resides is facing other resource constraints as well. In addition, in this view, you get a bit more information about the virtual machine in question, too. As you can see, this VM is facing far more resource issues than just CPU ready. I also want to point out the Time Travel box that you can see in the figure below. In this case, I’m able to go back in time to earlier monitored points and bring up fully correlated statistics from across the entire monitored environment. Using Time Travel makes it possible to go back to a point in time before an error took place in an attempt to ascertain what might have changed that resulted in the raising of a particular alert. This can be incredibly useful when it comes to nailing down those occasional and unpredictable issues.
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
4
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Figure 4.0
All-in-one Simplicity You might be wondering why I took you down this short rabbit hole. I found it incredibly easy to be able to drill down quickly into issues from this single console. There was no need to go out to other utilities. In going back to the dashboard, SolarWinds puts a lot of information there to help administrators get a good sense of what’s happening in the environment. In addition to showing recent alerts, the dashboard displays: • An environment map with tabs at the bottom that allow the administrator to view issues with virtual machines, hosts, storage, clusters, and applications. • CPU and RAM utilization in all monitored clusters. • CPU ready issues. CPU ready issues often point to either an over allocation of virtual CPUs or a need to add more processing cores to support the workload. • Data store free disk space. This kind of information is important to have at a glance, particularly when organizations have chosen to use thin provisioning. • Datastore I/O latency. A high I/O latency points to lack of sufficient storage resources to meet I/O expectations and may require the additional of more disks or solid state disks. ©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
5
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
• VM network I/O. Each virtual machine shares the VM network uplink. Administrarors can get at-a-glance information about which virtual machines might be using exorbitant network bandwidth. You can drill down into any of the listed items by simply clicking on it. In the figure below, you can see that this storage volume’s I/O latency topped out at 5.5 ms in recent hours.
Figure 5.0
Dashboards Aplenty Going back to the dashboards page, you can see that you are currently viewing the Administrator All VMware dashboard. There are many others from which to choose and each one displays different views of the environment. In Figure 6.0, I’ve opted to display the Capacity Planning dashboard, which is incredibly useful when it comes to determining the point at which resources in the environment will be exhausted. The information on this dashboard is based on historical resource usage. What I particularly like about this view is that it gives me exact dates. So, before October 24, 2028, I better add more CPU capacity to my Hyper-V cluster or I’ll be in big trouble! For this feature alone, I rate Virtualization Manager highly.
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
6
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Figure 6.0 With the understanding that storage has become notoriously difficult to manage in modern data centers, Virtualization Manager provides administrators with some relief in the form of deep metrics and guidance surrounding wasted storage resources. The monitoring tool provides administrators with information regarding storagerelated latency at various points in the virtual machine stack as well as a look at the number of IOPS that are being pushed through each data store. Perhaps even more importantly, Virtualization Manager helps administrators predict when data stores will run out of space and, from a capacity management perspective, tells administrators how much reclaimable disk space exists in thin provisioned environments. See Figures 7 and 8 for a look at these features.
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
7
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Figure 7.0 Resources in a virtual environment can’t be wasted. They are needed to apply to workloads that require additional resources and virtual machine density – the number of virtual machines that can be run in the environment – is maximized only when resources are used in an efficient way.
Figure 8.0
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
8
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
The VM Sprawl dashboard providers administrators with a plethora of information, all quickly accessible and easily understood. For example, in this environment, there are 18 idle VMs that an administrator can review to determine whether or not they need to be retained. However, this view also helps an administrator gain an understanding as to how much money wasted resources – specifically storage – could cost the organization. When translated to real dollars, it becomes easier to justify actions that bring additional efficiency to the data center.
Figure 9.0
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
9
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Figure 10.0
Figure 11.0
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
10
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Figure 12.0
This dashboard doesn’t just focus on over allocation, though. When Virtualization Manager detects that there aren’t sufficient resources to meet workload needs, those recommendations are displayed here for administrator review. It’s another way that the tool helps administrators maintain control over the environment. Statistics regarding the virtual environment are all well and good, but the business doesn’t care about the bits and the bytes. It cares about the mission-critical applications that are installed to support the business’ activities and which drive the bottom line. To that end, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager provides deep integration with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM). With monitoring support for more than 150 applications, SAM is a vital tool in IT’s support arsenal. With SAM, IT support staff no longer need to dig through individual application logs and performance monitors to find root cause issues for performance and availability issues. SAM provides a dashboard-based look at individual application details, including current and historic levels of performance, active alerts, and log files. Between Virtualization Manager and SAM, administrators gain complete insight into the goings-on inside the data center.
Based on having used Virtualization Manager in client environments and on my own use for this review, I found this latest version of a core SolarWinds product to be a solid contender in the monitoring market. It provides administrators with everything they need to ensure that systems remain available and operational while also providing assistance in ongoing capacity planning efforts and helping organizations general rightsize their virtual environments. s
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
11
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
Specifications & Pricing SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 is installed as a virtual appliance downloadable from SolarWinds. The product is licensed on a per-socket basis and is priced very reasonably, particularly given its broad feature set: VM16 (up to 16 sockets) – $ 5,995.00 VM32 (up to 32 sockets) – $ 10,995.00 VM64 (up to 64 sockets) – $ 16,995.00 VM112 (up to 112 sockets) – $ 23,995.00 VM192 (up to 192 sockets) – $ 33,995.00 VM320 (up to 320 sockets) – $ 52,995.00 System requirements for the host server are as follows:
• CPU: 4 vCPU • Memory: 8 GB+ • Hard Disk: 200 GB+ (can be thin provisioned) • Other: Virtual Appliance for VMware® or Hyper-V® • OS: Runs on VMware vSphere™ v5.x, 4.x, or Microsoft® Hyper-V 2008/2012 • Database: Integrated with Virtual Appliance
Final Thoughts & Rating Based on having used Virtualization Manager in client environments and on my own use for this review, I found this latest version of a core SolarWinds product to be a solid contender in the monitoring market. It provides administrators with everything they need to ensure that systems remain available and operational while also providing assistance in ongoing capacity planning efforts and helping organizations general rightsize their virtual environments. Download a Free Trial of Virtualization Manager Here >>
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
12
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager 6.0 Review
©2013 ActualTech Media. All Rights Reserved. Review featured on VirtualizationSoftware.com Rev. 1.05
13
