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Features Available in VMAN 8.2.1 (Orion)

Starting with VMAN 8.0, the appliance is no longer a requirement for VMAN, as it was in prior versions. VMAN functionality has been incrementally migrating over to the Orion Platform, for several releases, with some functionality only available on Orion, and some features still only available on the appliance. This post will identify what features are available on a VMAN 8.2.1 Orion only install, and what features are in progress from the appliance. If you use a feature extensively, that is on the appliance and you do not see listed on the post, please respond in the comments below, or add it directly to Virtualization Manager Feature Requests, so that this may be tracked.

Features/Functionality included in VMAN 8.2.1

FeatureDescriptionBenefit
VMAN Polling on Orion (Single Platform)

In VMAN 8.0, and higher, the appliance requirement to poll for VMAN functionality has been removed. VMAN is now fully installed with the Orion Installer and is part of the Orion Platform.  The data provide by VMAN Orion is far more extensive than the standard high-level virtualization metrics collected by NPM and SAM.

In addition to simplifying the install and maintenance requirements, VMAN functionality is extended by providing Orion only features such as Recommendations, PerfStack, AppStack, & AWS monitoring.  Orion core improvements apply to VMAN such as High Availability and DR.

Free Additional Polling Engine (APE)

The Additional Polling Engine (APE) provides large installs the ability to scale out VMAN installs by distributing VMAN polling away from the main poller to one or multiple APEs.  This functionality is free to VMAN customers and requires no additional licensing similar to the federated pollers used by the appliance.  As a note, federated polling functionality only supports VMAN appliance polling and the VMAN APE only support VMAN Orion Polling.

The VMAN APE benefits from the new Orion Installer which allows for easier upgrades and less management of the APE.

VM Sprawl

Complete coverage for VM Sprawl includes Rightsizing, Orphaned Files, Zombie VMs, Stale VMs, Idle VMs, snapshot usage, co-stop, and powered off VMs.

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Although similar to functionality found on the appliance, VM Sprawl on Orion adds additional functionality by selecting an action that allows for the immediate resolution to sprawl issues.

Actions that can be performed:

  • Add/remove CPU & Memory for over-allocated, under-allocated, & co-stop
  • Delete stale/oversized snapshots
  • Power off idle VMs
  • Delete powered off VMs
  • Delete orphaned VMDKs

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Performance Analysis - PerfStack | SolarWinds

Provides historical resource consumption of disparate selected metrics across multiple SolarWinds products. As a result, all performance data can be visualized over time to identify the root cause.

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  • Not available on the appliance
    • Compare metrics from VMAN, SRM, NPM, SAM, WPM, DPA, NCM, & NTA
    • Links from VM & Host Details that populate the PerfStack palette
    • Zoom into PerfStack charts to view more detail for the selected time period
    • Data ExplorerAlert visualization improvements
      • Export PerfStack data to Excel
    • Alert visualization improvements
      • Each individual alert start/end time is now visualized separately in PerfStack
      • Existing aggregate alert visualization against an object is retained

All Active Virtualization Alert Dashboard

Provides an out-of-the-box single dashboard that provides Hypervisor specific alerts with technical meaning and importance explained.  Critical alert always ”bubble – up” to the top to take the admins eye to what is important. Useful for new admins and virtualization experts alike for identifying issues in your virtual infrastructure soon after install with no additional configuration necessary.

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Provides easy to use and familiar Orion interface with drill down for explanation why alert was triggered.

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VMAN Alerting & Reporting

All out-of-the-box alerts and reports migrated to Orion web-based alerting and reporting.

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Ease of use has drastically improved over the original appliance.  The intuitive web-based reporting and alerting of Orion make it simple to use an out of the box alert/report or create your own custom version.

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Recommendations

The Recommendation Engine ensures VM stability and performance through provided actions:

  • Balance the virtual environment for optimal performance. You can spread the workload over hosts, which optimizes the performance of all virtual machines.
  • Optimize capacity. Virtualization Manager predicts when you will run out of resources on virtualization entities, so you can plan in advance when you have to assign new resources.
  • Predict possible future performance and capacity issues based on past trends.

Actionable Intelligence allows for single-click remediation of active and predicted VM performance and resource allocation.  Recommendations can be individually selected or multi-selected to be run immediately or scheduled to run at a later date and time.

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  • Not available on the appliance
  • Allows the admin to go from reactive to proactive when addressing performance issues.
Management Actions

Virtualization Manager provides administrators the ability to take actions on the alerts and metrics reported on within the interface. Administrators have the ability to execute Power management actions (Power Off/On, Reboot, and suspend a VM) & Snapshot Management actions (Take and delete snapshots) without leaving the Virtualization Manager interface.

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  • Not available on the appliance
  • These actions can be selected as triggers in custom alerts.

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AppStack

AppStack automatically gathers information about objects in your environment, as well as their respective relationships, and display them. Some relationships, such as groups and dependencies can be defined by the user.

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  • Not available on the appliance
Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring

Monitor and manage your AWS EC2 and EBS instances from the same console as your on-premises virtualization environment.

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  • Not available on the appliance
Capacity Planning

Model capacity trend analysis using current utilization of selected environment resources (resource depletion) and user-defined workloads.

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The new and improved capacity planning feature provides a modeling wizard, which is more intuitive and helps the user create various configurations along with test variable growth scenarios.  Administrators are now empowered to generate reports on the fly and provide accurate growth predictions of their virtual infrastructure to the business.

Search

Available in 8.2.1, the ability to search your monitored virtual environments is now integrated into VMAN on Orion

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Quickly navigate to a Virtual Machine, Host, Cluster, Datacenter or Datastore that is need of deeper troubleshooting.
Orion Maps

Available in 8.2.1, we have intelligent mapping of your virtual environment available on your entity details page

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  • Not available on the appliance

Migration to VMAN (Orion) - In Progress

FeatureDescription

Migration to VMAN (Orion) - Planned for Future Release

FeatureDescriptionFeature Request
ChargebackAnalyze virtual infrastructure consumption and associate the cost to the consumer of those resources.
Time TravelProvides forensic troubleshooting by showing historical relationship mapping and alert/issue indicators for a selected resource(s) in a configured point in time.
Cloud Cost (EC2)The Cloud Cost (EC2) dashboard displays data about the cost of moving your current virtual infrastructure or a part of it to Amazon EC2.
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