Creates lower-cost virtual appliance out of Hyper9 technology, rolls out enhancements
Virtualization complexity can present a challenge to IT managers at just about any company size. But SolarWinds doesn’t think that need be the case.
Since its January acquisition of Hyper9, SolarWinds has been focusing on making that company’s pioneering enterprise-scale virtualization management tool more cost-effective for smaller-size companies as well. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager — formerly Hyper9 — is now available as a $3,000 virtual appliance, with the first year of maintenance included, says Bob Quillin, senior director of product marketing at SolarWinds.
OVERVIEW: Virtualization management takes center stage
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager can provide all-in-one management — performance, capacity, configuration, chargeback and sprawl — for 50 virtual machines (VM). This compares to the thousands or tens of thousands of managed VMs targeted by the initial, highly scalable Hyper9 product, Quillin says. “We’ve been able to take the SolarWinds model to get a broader market reach and give customers an advanced set of features at a reasonable price,” he adds.
Besides making the Virtualization Manager more cost-effective for smaller organizations, this new release includes a variety of new features, including a performance-tracking enhancement called Time-Travel. With this feature, SolarWinds has exploited the performance and capacity information it captures to deliver a historical viewpoint, says Jonathan Reeve, virtualization management product manager at SolarWinds.
“If there was a backup problem last night with I/O, the administrators can go back in time to look at the data store, see which VMs were on that data store and which were driving the most I/O — it’s the ability to provide a historical snapshot, problem diagnostics and forensics for performance management,” Reeve says.
The product also now includes the enhanced performance analytics and capacity planning for network and storage I/O, he adds.
Lastly, with Virtualization Manager now comes a set of best-practice problem resolution recommendations. So with the tool, administrators not only should be able to pinpoint problems and but also follow best-practices recommendations and follow in-product contextual links — taking users to performance charts if they’re troubleshooting contention on VM hosts, for example — for quicker resolution, Reeve says.
