SolarWinds Integrates Virtualization and Storage Manager UN

Virtualization has changed how IT practitioners manage their environments, especially shared storage. Once users have virtualized up to 30 percent of their environment, managing storage infrastructure is critical to ensuring performance and capacity of the overall environment and establishing a cloud foundation.

SolarWinds Inc. is responding to this step in virtualization’s maturity and announced the integration of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and SolarWinds Storage Manager.

"Users who are now dealing with the operational challenges associated with virtualization’s impact on the storage infrastructure are asking: ‘What VMs are using which physical storage resources?‘ and ‘Is my poor performance due to storage or a LUN or VM?‘," said Suku Krishnaraj, SolarWinds’ SVP of Product Strategy. "With Virtualization Manager and Storage Manager’s new integration features, users can gain a centralized look across the entire virtual and cloud infrastructure."

Virtualization Manager, which won the Best of VMworld Gold award for virtualization management at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas, is a virtualization management software solution that delivers integrated capacity planning and performance management, VM sprawl control, configuration management, and charge back automation. It integrates with Storage Manager allowing users to go beyond the data store stats, to the LUN and ultimately the physical disk level stats, providing full VM-to-spindle visibility for simpler and quicker troubleshooting.

Storage Manager gives users visibility into shared storage, including most storage arrays and the servers, switches hosts and VMs they are connected to. Together with Virtualization Manager, users gain a view of a LUN and all related infrastructure, both physical and virtual, to diagnose performance issues. With this feature, users can determine if storage is the reason for poor performance of a VM.

In addition, both products support VMware vSphere 5, including integrated capacity planning, performance monitoring, VM sprawl control, configuration management, and charge back automation.

"There’s only one way to really simplify the management of virtual infrastructure – with software designed from the ground up to manage the complex and dynamically-changing relationships that exist across your virtualized environment," added Krishnaraj. "SolarWinds is changing the game by offering easy-to-use, affordable solutions that empower today’s IT admin to not only take control of their environment but that give them the tools to develop professionally and prepare for future advancements such as IT as a service."

Pricing and Availability
Virtualization Manager and SolarWinds Storage Manager are available and pricing starts at $2,995, with the first year of maintenance included.