Virtualization has dramatically changed how IT practitioners manage their environments, especially shared storage. Once users have virtualized up to 30 percent of their environment, managing storage infrastructure is critical to ensuring performance and capacity of the overall environment and ultimately establishing a successful cloud foundation. SolarWinds Inc., a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT Management Software, is responding to this step in virtualization’s maturity and today announced the integration of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and SolarWinds Storage Manager.

“Users who are now dealing with the operational challenges associated with virtualization’s impact on the storage infrastructure are asking: ‘What VMs are using which physical storage resources?’ and ‘Is my poor performance due to storage or a LUN or VM?’,” said Suku Krishnaraj, SolarWinds’ SVP of Product Strategy. “With Virtualization Manager and Storage Manager’s new integration features, users can gain a centralized look across the entire virtual and cloud infrastructure.”

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, which won the Best of VMworld “Gold” award for virtualization management at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas, is a comprehensive virtualization management software solution that delivers integrated capacity planning and performance management, VM sprawl control, configuration management, and chargeback automation. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager integrates with SolarWinds Storage Manager allowing users to go beyond the datastore stats, to the logical unit number (LUN) and ultimately the physical disk level stats, providing full VM-to-spindle visibility for simpler and quicker troubleshooting.

SolarWinds Storage Manager gives users unmatched visibility into shared storage that is not available through other vendor solutions, including most storage arrays and the servers, switches hostsand VM’s they are connected to. Together with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, users gain a comprehensive view of a LUN and all related infrastructure, both physical and virtual, to diagnose performance issues. With this feature, users can quickly determine if storage is truly the reason for poor performance of a VM.

In addition, both products support VMware vSphere 5, including integrated capacity planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, configuration management, and chargeback automation.

“There’s only one way to really simplify the management of virtual infrastructure — with software designed from the ground up to manage the complex and dynamically-changing relationships that exist across your virtualized environment,” added Krishnaraj.“SolarWinds is changing the game by offering easy-to-use, affordable solutions that empower today’s IT admin to not only take control of their environment but that give them the tools to develop professionally and prepare for future advancements such as IT as a service.”

Pricing and Availability

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and SolarWinds Storage Manager are available now and pricing starts at $2,995(USD), with the first year of maintenance included. For more information, visit the SolarWinds website, download a free 30-day evaluation, or call 866.530.8100.