The
SolarWinds team has been busy behind the scenes working on their next
iteration of Virtualization Manager 6.2. And after visiting with them
last week to see the final product, it proved to be time well spent.
Along
with some really new interesting features described below, the company
also more firmly integrated its virtualization management product with
its Orion Technology for even more comprehensive insight into IT
infrastructure performance. The integration also allows the insertion
of critical virtualization data within SolarWinds' AppStack dashboard
for even greater visibility into the health and performance of
applications.

So what is Orion technology?
Orion
is the unique platform technology that is the backbone of many
SolarWinds solutions across network (performance, traffic,
configuration, IP addresses, etc.), systems (servers and applications,
storage) and beyond. Orion collects data on the health of these various
IT infrastructure components and displays the results in a common,
easy-to-understand dashboard. Monitoring functionalities include
reporting and alerting and management functionalities include built-in
remediation actions like starting/stopping processes, deleting
snapshots, starting websites and more.
With
Orion modules for virtualization monitoring,
SolarWinds allows IT pros to share critical performance metrics and
data among other modules within Orion. This information is also now
visible in the AppStack dashboard, so that IT pros can see the status
and relationships among website user experience, applications, servers,
and virtual and storage infrastructure layers. By having complete
visibility from the array to the application, users are able to pinpoint
the source of application performance issues in seconds.
What is Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager provides comprehensive VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V capacity
planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, configuration
management, and chargeback automation. With new integration into the
Orion technology backbone and AppStack dashboard-enablement,
Virtualization Manager shows the datastore level of detail that bridges
the critical details from Storage Resource Monitor to Server &
Application Monitor.
What's new in 6.2?
Some of the new features and improvements found in SolarWinds Virtualization Manager v6.2 include:
- AppStack Environment view in the Orion web console, provides
visibility into the relations existing between the different entities on
your network (Identify
the root cause of problems by quickly drilling into the app, server,
virtual, and storage layers to troubleshoot performance issues).
- Troubleshoot a virtual environment with visibility from a virtual
machine all the way through the storage environment.
- Orion
functionality empowers users to take action on their virtual
infrastructures (e.g., power on, power off, suspend and reboot a VM), allowing them to
delegate operational tasks to non-virtual admins or teams (such as
helpdesk) without providing access to a hypervisor.
- Create and delete virtual snapshots from within the Orion console.
- Added Co-Stop % Counter which can detect when too many vCPUs have been added to a VM thereby slowing its performance.
- The
Web-based alerting engine allows users to create custom alerts that can
trigger scripts and actions when thresholds are met.
- Adds the ability to monitor the hardware health of nodes in the Orion web console.
- New setting to control the content creation rights of non-administrator users.
- Support for the vCenter Server Appliance.
- Support for IPv6 addresses on the Virtualization Manager user interface.
- Security fixes and more.
Learn more about SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 6.2 -- Download a Free Trial or Watch an Interactive Demo