Virtual Machine Performance Management
Gain insight into virtual server performance with intuitive and comprehensive dashboards
SolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) dashboards are built to show virtual server performance for VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments. VMAN is designed to provide environment views capable of automatically mapping virtual machines (VMs) to their underlying host, storage, and related objects, allowing you to quickly see virtual server performance correlations.
The detailed alerts in VMAN can also give you hypervisor-specific conditions, thresholds, and custom recommendations to fix problems plus status alerts about your physical host to let you analyze overall hardware health.
Eliminate bottlenecks with storage I/O performance metrics and alerts
Storage I/O performance is a common cause of bottlenecks in vSphere, AHV, and Hyper-V environments. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is designed to give you a comprehensive view of all shared storage via a single pane of glass.
The customizable dashboards built in VMAN can provide critical storage metrics, such as read/write, IOPs, throughput, and more. Storage contention issues can also be viewed at cluster, host, and virtual machine levels, so you can address them at the right time to better avoid application performance issues.
Use past performance analysis to speed up troubleshooting
The virtualization dependency mapping feature in VMAN is designed to provide a visual overview of related objects, helping streamline your virtual server monitoring.
Additionally, the time travel feature in SolarWinds VMAN can offer a historical account of configuration data and infrastructure relationships to help you identify what dependencies existed at a specific time in your virtual server environment, such as VMs belonging to a host seven days ago. This data can be used to answer the “What changed?” question all IT pros regularly face.
Use virtual server monitoring recommendations to manage and optimize virtual resources
The out-of-the-box virtual server monitoring tools in VMAN are built to offer optimization strategies for managing your virtual resources overall. You can use the integrated Sprawl Dashboard, Recommendations, and Capacity Planning tools to evaluate VM usage, rebalance allocation, pinpoint sprawl, and eliminate rogue VMs.
The active recommendations provided by VMAN can also help you resolve VM issues as they occur, while predictive recommendations use historical trends to help anticipate and prepare for upcoming virtual server performance and capacity issues.
Investigate virtual server performance issues with precision virtual machine monitoring tools
SolarWinds PerfStack™ and AppStack™ dashboards are also available for use with VMAN virtual machine monitoring tools to help you drill down deeper into performance issues. PerfStack compares and analyzes multiple metrics across several products at once to provide a visual, historical timeline. AppStack graphically represents monitored nodes in a custom map, allowing for quick visual scans of VM statuses, plus one-click drill-down into node details. Combining these tools can help provide more comprehensive virtual machine performance management.
Get More on Virtual Machine Performance Management
What is virtual machine performance management?
Virtual machine performance management involves gaining visibility into the inner workings of your VM environment to isolate, solve, and proactively prevent future virtual server performance issues.
Virtualization is a scalable computing solution to help reduce IT costs, increase productivity and agility, and enable more automated processes. However, managing virtual machines can come with challenges. A single virtual server environment can contain numerous virtual machines operating simultaneously on a single computer. With so many moving parts, how can you pinpoint what’s causing virtual machine performance issues? Virtual machine performance management is a strategy used to gather health and status metrics from across your virtual instances.
How does virtual machine performance management work?
The virtual machine performance management process works by addressing five key requirements:
- The need to have a single, unified platform offering critical visibility into the health status configuration, and performance of virtual systems
- A way to proactively troubleshoot and predict what changes to the network will occur once certain application changes have been made
- A tool or suite of tools to effectively strike a balance between over-provisioning and under-provisioning resources
- A way to track how different virtual machines are coexisting on the same host
- Making any necessary changes to virtual machines and their configurations or infrastructures to facilitate more efficient operations
Using VM monitoring tools to perform virtual machine performance management can help support your ability to perform analysis by gathering metrics from across your systems into a consolidated view. Being proactive about virtual machine performance management by using the right tools can help when problems arise, because you already have the data you need to quickly resolve issues.
Why is virtual machine performance management important?
While many businesses rely on virtual operating systems and servers to save on hardware costs, if mismanaged, virtual instances can also cause a drag on overall system health. Virtual machine performance management is important because poor VM performance can affect overall business operations.
Following virtual machine management best practices can help keep all VMs within the systems environment healthy. This is critical because although separate VMs aren’t interrelated, they’re interconnected in terms of performance impact. Virtual machine performance management helps IT administrators sustain optimal operating conditions, pinpoint performance issues, eliminate bottlenecks, and troubleshoot VMs more effectively.
What does a virtual machine performance management tool do?
Searching through thousands of counters and metrics by hand to discover virtual machine performance issues and manually managing a shared pool of virtual resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network) can be time-consuming as well as error-prone. Virtual machine monitoring tools can help IT administrators optimize and streamline virtual server monitoring and resource management by automating many of the most laborious processes. These tools also offer centralized platforms to facilitate faster analysis and reporting.
Here are 10 important metrics and performance issues virtual machine monitoring tools should help track:
- Memory ballooning
- VM sprawl
- Memory swapping
- Old VM snapshots
- VM disk read
- General hardware health
- General usage and distribution of VM resources
- VM Wait and Ready times
- Network connectivity
- Datastore capacity and resource availability
How does virtual machine performance management work in Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is designed to be an all-inclusive virtualization performance monitoring tool to help IT administrators drill down on important aspects involved in managing a virtualization system, including monitoring, performance management, resource allocation, and overall optimization. This tool is also built to handle VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V environments both on-premises and in the cloud.
The intuitive dashboards in VMAN are designed to offer unmatched visibility into your systems environment, which can help you highlight performance bottlenecks and allow for detailed deep drills into issues. Virtualization Manager can also be integrated with the AppStack and PerfStack dashboards to help you tap into a more detailed view of application and infrastructure performance.
Managing a shared pool of virtual resources can be challenging for enterprises going through a growth period, but the storage I/O performance metrics and alerts in VMAN are built to help make capacity planning easier. SolarWinds VMAN also offers detailed past performance configurations information to help you find and correlate performance issues, with many additional capabilities to help you keep your virtual environments healthy and running at full capacity.
- What is virtual machine performance management?
- How does virtual machine performance management work?
- Why is virtual machine performance management important?
- What does a virtual machine performance management tool do?
- How does virtual machine performance management work in Virtualization Manager?
What is virtual machine performance management?
Virtual machine performance management involves gaining visibility into the inner workings of your VM environment to isolate, solve, and proactively prevent future virtual server performance issues.
Virtualization is a scalable computing solution to help reduce IT costs, increase productivity and agility, and enable more automated processes. However, managing virtual machines can come with challenges. A single virtual server environment can contain numerous virtual machines operating simultaneously on a single computer. With so many moving parts, how can you pinpoint what’s causing virtual machine performance issues? Virtual machine performance management is a strategy used to gather health and status metrics from across your virtual instances.
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager… provides the same level of information and statistics as VMware vRealize Operations Manager at a fraction of the price."
IT Manager
Educational Institution
Take full control of virtual machine performance management
Virtualization Manager
Resolve virtual server management issues with a single click.
Leverage custom recommendations for optimal VM size and placement.
Reclaim virtual machine resources back into the virtual pool.
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VMAN, an Orion module, is built on the SolarWinds Platform
