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SolarWinds IT Management Glossary

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What is Virtual Machine Management

Virtual Machine Management is the process of planning, configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting virtual machine environments. Unlike traditional server management, virtual machine management requires new management tools that are designed to deal with a shared, dynamic resource environment. There are several areas that become more critical functions in virtual machine management. 1. Planning and optimization of virtual machine capacity. Because performance of applications within a virtual environment is unknown, there is a tendency to over-allocate resources to virtual servers, resulting in wasted capacity with no performance improvement. Virtual machine management tools can help optimize the allocation of resources and predict when resources will run out. 2. Performance monitoring goes beyond O/S statistics and must include data from the shared environment. These virtual machine management statistics are provided by the hypervisor and allow you to monitor how various workloads can impact each other's performance. 3. Sprawl monitoring is a new function that is the result of the creation of virtual machines being simple and quick. Virtual Machine Management tools come in multiple flavors. In the early days, many specialized in one function, such as capacity planning; however, modern tools take an integrated approach to virtual machine management, providing performance, capacity, sprawl management, configuration tracking, as well as reporting and alerting. Virtual Machine Management tools come in multiple flavors. In the early days, many specialized in one function, such as capacity planning; however, modern tools take an integrated approach to virtual machine management, providing performance, capacity, sprawl management, configuration tracking, as well as reporting and alerting.

SolarWinds FREE Tools Related to Virtual Machine Management

VM Console

What do you do when a virtual machine is running amuck—or not running at all—and you just want to restart it without slogging through vCenter™ or vSphere™? With our free VM Console you can bounce that blue-screened troublemaker, track up/down status, take snapshots of all your VMs, and more!

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SAN Monitor

Quickly and easily monitor EMC®, Dell®, IBM®, and Sun® StorageTek™ storage arrays! Our free SAN Monitor delivers the real-time visibility you need to stay steps ahead of infrastructure evils that threaten to slow storage performance.

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VM Monitor

Track virtualization health at-a-glance with X-ray vision into your ESX Servers! Our free VM Monitor continuously monitors a VMware ESX Server and its virtual machines and delivers detailed virtual machine health statistics including VM name, guest OS, and VM state, as well as processor, memory, and network usage.

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SolarWinds Products Related to Virtual Machine Management

Storage Manager

Storage Manager makes it easy to manage the performance and growth of your multi-vendor storage environment. With end-to-end mapping of your physical and virtual infrastructure, Storage Manager delivers the comprehensive view into storage health that you need to troubleshoot problems quickly. Learn More »

Virtualization Manager

Virtualization Manager makes it easy to manage all the aspects of your virtual infrastructure by providing the tools to control VM sprawl, eliminate bottlenecks, optimize performance, track configuration changes, manage capacity, and track and showback departmental and business unit usage and costs. Learn More »