Features/Functionality included in VMAN 8.3
Starting with VMAN 8.0, the appliance is no longer a requirement for VMAN, as it was in prior versions. VMAN functionality has been migrating over to the Orion Platform, with some functionality only available with VMAN on Orion, and some only available on the legacy appliance. This post will identify what features are available on a VMAN 8.3 Orion only install, and what features are in progress from the appliance.
If you use a feature extensively, 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.
Consider retiring the VMAN appliance to receive the full benefit of the new features available only on VMAN on Orion.
If you'd like to see what these features look like before changing your monitoring environment, explore the interactive demo.
| Feature | Description | Benefit for VMAN on Orion |
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| VMAN Polling on Orion (Single Platform) | In VMAN 8.0, and higher, the dependency on the appliance for virtualization monitoring has been removed. VMAN is now fully installed with the Orion Installer and is part of the Orion Platform. | In addition to simplifying the install and maintenance requirements, VMAN functionality is extended by providing Orion only features such as Recommendations, PerfStack, AppStack, Orion Maps, AWS and Azure monitoring. Data provided by VMAN Orion is far more extensive than the standard high-level virtualization metrics collected by NPM and SAM. Orion Platform features such as High Availability are also available. |
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. See our sizing guide for recommendations as you consider how to scale out your environment |
| 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.
| 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.
| 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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Complete coverage for VM Sprawl includes Rightsizing, Orphaned Files, Zombie VMs, Stale VMs, Idle VMs, snapshot usage, co-stop, and powered off VMs.
| 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:
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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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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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| Orion Maps | Contextual intelligent mapping that does not require any configuration reflects the state of your environment and the relationships between entities.
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| Recommendations | The Recommendation Engine ensures VM stability and performance through provided actions:
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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| 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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| Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring | Monitor and manage your Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure instances from the same console as your on-premises virtualization environment.
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| Capacity Planning | Model capacity trend analysis using current utilization of selected environment resources (resource depletion) and user-defined workloads.
| 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 | Quickly navigate to a Virtual Machine, Host, Cluster, Datacenter or Datastore that is need of deeper troubleshooting.
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| VMware vSAN monitoring | Environments are moving to utilize more hyper-converged infrastructure, which in large part utilizes flexible solutions such as VMware vSAN's software defined storage. Utilize the out of the box views and configure alerts to notify when you're running out of capacity.
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| Visibility into Containers | Containers are another great option for virtualization admins to consider for use to host applications. They can exist alongside virtual machines or even be hosted on them. Luckily with VMAN you can now have side by side visibility into your containers on your virtual environments. We support Kubernetes, Docker & Apache Mesos.
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Migration to VMAN (Orion) - In Progress
| Feature | Description |
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| WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON FOR VIRTUALIZATION MANAGER (UPDATED August, 2018) | We are constantly adding new features and functionality. Subscribe to updates from our WWWO page to see the new feature set that we are actively working on. |
On the appliance, this feature was known to provide forensic troubleshooting by showing historical relationship mapping and alert/issue indicators for a selected resource(s) in a configured point in time. The Orion version of this feature is rooted in our new Orion Platform 2018.2 feature: Orion Maps - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support The version of maps that is included in VMAN 8.3 is tightly integrated with VMAN recommendations, but as Orion maps has a wonderful roadmap of new improvements for the future I will list this as in progress for the foreseeable future. |
