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It supports both VMware and Hyper-V hosts and provides a single centralised console from which you can manage and monitor.

VMan runs as a virtual machine and SolarWinds provides versions for VMware and Hyper-V. We opted for the latter and simply imported the VMan ZIP file as a new VM onto our Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V host. The VMan web console is a tidy affair and opens with a wizard where you start by entering all the credentials required to manage your environment. Next comes your data sources and we added the IP addresses of all the lab's Hyper-V hosts.

Two separate data collection schedules are required for each host where one gathers configuration details and the second pulls in performance data. For all practical purposes, the default setting of collection being once every 12 hours is sufficient, but it can be increased if there is a clear operational reason.

The VMan dashboard provides a slick at-a-glance overview of the virtual environment. Its use of widgets makes it extremely versatile and it can be customised to suit your requirements precisely. There's a big choice of widgets including those that show alerts, performance, resource consumption, trends and much more. We swiftly created a dashboard for our lab with widgets showing a map of our entire virtual environment, running VMs and their detected OS, a pie chart of virtual disks and performance charts for individual VMs.

Fitment widgets will prove useful as they can advise on how many more VMs you can add based on the current load. Top-N widgets can be used for a variety of purposes where they can show, for example, VMs with high CPU usage, those with data stores approaching their limits or perhaps, stale VMs that no-one has used for a while.

The Dashboard Explore pane opens with a map view of the entire environment plus others for hosts and data stores. Time Travel is a really useful feature from which you can select a VM and step back through time to see generated alerts.

Hover the mouse pointer over any map icon and a pop-up box will show all related alerts for that entity. Selecting a VM icon from any map also takes you to its own page which provides details ranging from CPU and memory usage to IOPS and network throughput.

VMan has a report for every occasion and you can sift through them quickly by selecting filter options in the left console pane. There are literally hundreds to choose from and any can be scheduled to run regularly and customised using queries. VMan's business views provide a wealth of trend data on any monitored attribute. These can be viewed as a line graph over time while the Data Center Visualizer offers pie charts showing details on selected facets.

Using supply and demand calculations, the Capacity Planner helps forecast future needs as it can show when your current environment will run out of steam and how many more VMs your hosts can handle, including what will happen if you add extra resources. Should you decide to migrate everything into the cloud it will even tell you how much it would cost to host everything using Amazon's EC2 service.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager provides the information that businesses need to keep control of their virtualised environments and make the best use of valuable resources. It can also snap-in to the SolarWinds Orion web console to provide even more details and its sensible socket-based licensing scheme makes it good value. NC

Product: Virtualization Manager 6.1
Supplier: SolarWinds
Tel: 0800 028 6782
Web site: www.solarwinds.com
Price: From £1,975 excluding VAT for 8 sockets