The latest release candidate for VMAN (2020.2) is now available in your customer portal.
Each release candidate is a fully tested and supported version of the product and you can upgrade current production servers, while retaining your complete configuration and history.
If you're looking for release notes and other supporting documentation, please click the links below:
VMAN 2020.2 release notes
VMAN 2020.2 system requirements
Orion Platform 2020.2 release notes
Orion Platform 2020.2 release summary
What's new?
Nutanix in Maps
Orion Maps now supports your Nutanix architecture. Below, we see a single Nutanix cluster with three separate hosts and underlying VMs.
Orion Maps is invaluable when it comes to visualizing and, in turn assessing, your environments architecture. As an example, if you take the simple map above and add in a datastore, you get the following map, and begin to have a better understanding of the sharing or resources.
NTA now supports flow for VMware distributed switch in NTA 2020.2
Click over to this document to read the details about flow support in VMware distributed switches.
If you have resources in the cloud you are monitoring with VMAN or SAM you may want to check out Azure Networking support in NPM 2020.2
Click over to this document to read details about the latest support for Azure Networking in NPM.
Peak Metrics in PerfStack
Something we get told often with metrics is that, while averages are great, minimum and maximums over a period for a metric give a better sense of our performance and can also help with items such as charge backs and throttling. So, with this release, VMAN is storing minimums and maximums along with averages for metrics such as IOPS, memory, and latency at the virtual machine level. Looking at this chart below from PerfStack:
You see that just looking at the average IOPS read over the polling interval is somewhat deceiving. Over the 6:10AM interval the IOPS read value spiked, but that is missed when looking at only the average. With this, we think we’re providing you some valuable, additional detail into the performance of your VMs.
Storage at Cluster, Host, VM
As we progress with improving Nutanix monitoring, one important area of focus has been storage monitoring. One of the greatest value propositions Nutanix provides is ease of storage management, which means that there is a lot going on with your storage layer, and thus a lot worth monitoring. With the 2020.2 release, VMAN now monitors storage metrics at all levels of your Nutanix environment from the cluster and host level all the way down to individual VMs and datastores.
Some screenshots below of the various out of the box widgets at the various levels of hierarchy.
Storage Summary at Host Level:
Storage IO Details at VM Level:
Top 10 Datastores at Cluster Level:
CPU/Memory/Network metrics at cluster and VM level
As mentioned before, we focused on storage metrics with Nutanix. But that’s not all we added. Now, as you’re used to with your other monitored entities, VMAN reports on CPU, memory, and network metrics for Nutanix as well. Out of the box monitoring includes widgets and reportable metrics on anything from host response time and packet loss to VM level cross metric views. Some screenshots below.
AHV Entity Type
AHV monitoring has arrived to VMAN! Nutanix’s native hypervisor solution is now supported by VMAN for monitoring. We have heard many of our Nutanix customers calls for support as they begun to further leverage AHV for their VM implementation.
New Orion Platform Features
With this VMAN RC comes some fantastic new updates & enhancements to the Orion Platform which include:
- Monitor up to 1,000,000 elements per Orion Platform instance.
- For SAM components the limit is increased to be 550,000 components per SAM installation.
- An Orion Map to Success! - Orion Maps improvements, such as creating and customizing text boxes, labels, or layouts, incorporating custom icons, adding shapes, dynamic backgrounds, bulk administration and all new Time Travel.
- Performance enhancements
- Dashboards, Dashboards, Get Your Dashboards! All New Custom Summary Dashboards
- A Gateway To Your Fastest Upgrade Ever! - Upgrade improvements, such as pre-staging upgrades, upgrade plan reports, automating upgrades via Orion SDK
- Enhanced volume status
- 3rd Party Language Pack Support - scripts to extract UI texts from the Orion Web Console
Your Feedback Counts!
I'm incredibly interested in your feedback, and what's even better is that when you participate by downloading and installing the RC, you get thwack points. More importantly your feedback shapes our products. Post your thoughts, questions and concerns into the RC forum and not only will you be able to get some SolarWinds swag, but we the VMAN team will be watching for input to make the product better and better. In addition, sometimes you'll come up with a brand new feature ideas that we would want to consider for a future version. The best place to capture those ideas would be VMAN Feature Requests and as you can see from our What We’re Working on for VMAN page, we take those inputs very seriously.