Documentation forVirtualization Manager

Basic deployment considerations

When planning any VMAN deployment, consider the following:

  • In medium and large deployments, SolarWinds recommends that you deploy Additional Polling Engines (APE) for SolarWinds Platform installations or federated collectors for VMAN appliance installations for every 3,000 virtual machines. Then, split the collection load in a balanced way so that each server collects a similar amount of data.
  • For the VMware events feature, VMAN supports a flat amount of 1000 VMware events per second, regardless of deployment size and number of APEs. Important: VMware events utilize the Log Viewer and count toward Log Viewer/Log Analyzer's 1000 EPS limit.
  • Any number of deployment factors could cause the recommended size to grow from small to medium to large. For example, for VMware virtual machine environments, the number of VMs per vCenter significantly affects the amount of resources you need for the server that's monitoring that vCenter.
  • For VMware virtual machines, if you collect data from large vCenters containing more than 4,000-5,000 virtual machines, increase the memory assigned to the server that collects from the vCenter (the main Orion server, the main appliance server, or the Additional Polling Engine or federated collector).
  • If you are scaling your environment with Additional Polling Engines or federated collectors, and you're monitoring a vCenter in VMAN, all hosts belonging to that vCenter will be monitored (polled) by the same server.
  • If you are scaling your environment with Additional Polling Engines or federated collectors, Hyper-V hosts belonging to the same Hyper-V cluster should always be monitored (polled) by the same server.

Find out which type of polling your VMAN environment is using and why it matters

To verify which type of polling your environment is using:

  1. Log in to your VMAN server's SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

    2. If you're using the VMAN appliance and have not integrated it with a SolarWinds Platform installation, you'll scale your VMAN appliance environment. See Scaling your VMAN appliance deployment.

  2. Navigate to Settings > All Settings > Under Node & Group Management > Manage Virtual Devices.
  3. Select the Hyper-V tab if you're monitoring Hyper-V VMs or the VMware tab if you're monitoring VMware VMs.
  4. Check the Polling Method column to determine the polling method used to monitor each virtual machine.

Why your polling method matters

Your polling method determines whether to scale your SolarWinds Platform with Additional Polling Engines or to scale your VMAN appliance with federated collectors. You won't need to do both.

VMAN discovers and monitors physical ESXi network adapters (vmnic*). Collected metrics include inbound and outbound traffic, interface errors, and availability derived from link speed.

VMkernel adapters (vmk*) are not discovered as monitorable interfaces. No traffic, error, or availability metrics are collected for them. VMkernel adapter information may be used internally for host IP and management address resolution, but vmk adapters are not exposed as resources in the product UI.