SolarWinds, the Austin, Texas-based IT management software maker, has shipped an updated edition of its Virtualization Manager solution with new analysis and automation capabilities.
While prior releases of the solution issued alerts when virtual machines were running short on memory or storage capacity, the new Virtualization Manager 7 lets administrators take automated action in response to such issues as well.
“We now are giving you recommendations to actually execute the fix or schedule the fix right out of Virtualization Manager,” says SolarWinds senior product marketing manager Jared Hensle.
That functionality can be a serious time saver for IT administrators, who require anywhere from an hour to a full day on average to isolate the root cause of virtualization performance problems and even longer to remediate such issues, according to a 2016 study sponsored by SolarWinds.
The new system can also comb through historical data for opportunities to improve a virtualized infrastructure’s performance and efficiency, by shutting down underutilized VMs, removing resources from overprovisioned machines, or scheduling added capacity for times when usage requirements tend to peak, for example.
“We are allowing you to analyze the past, fix the present, and prepare for the future,” Hensle says.
Virtualization Manager is an integrated component of the SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring platform, so companies can also apply its diagnostic capabilities to other solutions in that suite. If Orion’s Server & Application Monitor system sends repeated alerts about a Microsoft Exchange server, for example, the new edition of Virtualization Manager can help technicians trace the problem back to a virtual host with insufficient memory.
Though Orion users tend to be midsize or larger businesses, the new Virtualization Manager is a strong fit as well for small businesses that lack either the resources or experience to optimize virtual server deployments themselves, according to vice president of product marketing Gerardo Dada.
“It’s like having an expert working for you that’s going to be able to take care of all the things you don’t have time to do,” he says.
At present, Virtualization Manager 7 can forecast issues up to one week in advance. SolarWinds expects to increase that timeframe later once the system has proven its ability to spot near-term problems accurately.
Virtualization Manager 7 is available worldwide immediately. SolarWinds customers with existing maintenance contracts and download and install the system free of charge.
