How SolarWinds Virtualization Manager Can Help You Win With Management
Sure, you’re good at your job, but how can you put the proof in the pudding? Using some of the key features of SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) can help you not only increase your overall business agility when monitoring and managing your virtual machines, but it can also win you points with management while you’re at it!
These days, virtualization monitoring software is integral to the success of most organizations. VMAN is a powerful virtual machine (VM) monitoring tool built to consolidate various useful observations in one interface. In this blog post, we’ll look at three ways in which VMAN can save you time and effort which in turn means saved money.
Visibility
Number one, having comprehensive visibility into the health and performance of your virtual machines and hypervisors, whether they’re on premises, hyperconverged, hybrid, or in the cloud, is key to laying out your environment. With the ability to rely on contextual dependency maps of one object, or multiple objects, you can easily see the relationships between a server and objects in your VM environment.
VMAN also monitors both Azure and AWS metrics for example, straight from a single dashboard, this means you no longer have to toggle between different virtualization monitoring tools, and tool consolidation means saved time, which means saved dollars.
Troubleshooting
Secondly, uncovering the right problem is half the solution. VMAN has built-in, actionable intelligence designed to provide recommendations to optimize your VMware, vSphere, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. Detailed recommendations alert you to specific performance problems and include the ability to execute the fix. Recommendations may generate a multi-step fix to achieve the optimal performance state and relieve CPU, memory, and storage contention.
No one hates having to bring the system down to keep it running more than management. With VMAN, having the ability to schedule recommendations and fixes automatically after hours or at a preselected time keeps everything on the move during peak hours.
Capacity Planning and Optimization
Third, and perhaps most importantly for this conversation, using powerful capacity planning and optimization tools and mapping them back to useful reporting for management to review is a big way to win points with your IT manager and the finance department, and potentially up to the C-suite.
Often, product teams work in silos and don’t communicate effectively amongst one another. With so much happening, keeping up daily productivity outweighs where environments can be optimized.
Virtualization Manager’s capacity planning tools contain the following features:
- A modeling function designed to project future server and hardware additions to see if your environment can scale to meet workload needs
- Easy-to-view consumption trends to determine resource warning and outage dates, or you can customize the sample timeframe to create individual capacity plans for peak or non-peak usage
- What-if modeling scenarios, such as accessing existing virtual machines and host usage to see the effects of a host or multiple hosts going down
- Hyper-V capacity planning function determining the best location for virtual machines
- Built to average resource by clusters and compare cluster-by-cluster resource constraints, which can help determine the ideal location for future workload placement
Looking not only at your current state, but planning for the future as well, VMAN uses chargeback reporting to calculate the computing costs of specific virtual workloads. This allows IT to easily communicate with internal and external partners the costs associated with their projects, allowing for more effective budgeting. It can also help highlight where some VMs are under or over utilized, and where solutions could be implemented on existing machines rather than buying new ones. Simply put, reporting is never a bad thing when it helps you understand where your costs are going.
At the end of the day, your IT colleagues see more functionality, making their job easier. The finance department sees well thought out optimized budgeting, and management sees a return on investment and better business agility. A win for everyone.
Looking for a Virtualization Management Solution? SolarWinds Virtualization Manager can help. Download a free trial today!
For more info, watch an accompanying webinar series here!
