Virtualization Manager Administrator Guide

This guide provides an overview of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager features and related technologies. In addition, it contains recommendations on best practices, tutorials for getting started, and troubleshooting information for common situations.

Virtualization Manager Features

This section describes features specific for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN). VMAN uses common functions of Orion Platform products.

• Monitoring virtual environments with VMAN
  • Information to help you get started with VMAN.
  • Introduction to monitoring virtual environments with VMAN
  • Add and manage virtual systems to monitor
  • Alerts and events in VMAN
  • Reports in VMAN
• Optimizing virtual resources
  • Learn about tools to evaluate current usage, locate possible allocation issues, and manage resources.
  • Introduction to optimizing virtual resources
  • Evaluate VMs using the Sprawl dashboard
  • Manage virtual environments with Recommendations
  • Run scenarios with Capacity Planning
  • Manage and troubleshoot VMs using Appstack
  • Investigate VM performance in PerfStack
  • Customize and configure VMAN
• Monitoring cloud instances and VMs
  • Information on using the Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring feature for Orion products.
  • Monitor cloud instances and VMs
  • Add the first cloud account to the Orion Platform
  • Explore cloud instances and VMs on the Cloud Summary page
  • Configure cloud accounts for the Orion Platform
  • Cloud service polling overview
  • Throttling overview
  • Manage your cloud infrastructure
• The VMAN appliance
  • Information about the VMAN appliance for VMAN version 8.0 and higher.
  • The VMAN appliance
  • Integration and Synchronization with VMAN
  • Synchronize VMAN entities with the Synchronization Wizard

Common Orion Platform features used with VMAN

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager uses the Orion Platform, the core architecture for the SolarWinds IT Management Portfolio.

• Orion Platform requirements
  • Hardware, software, and port requirements for the Orion Platform server and for the SolarWinds Orion database.
  • Orion Platform requirements
• Licensing
  • Activate, add, upgrade or assign licenses with the web-based License Manager in the Orion Web Console.
  • License SolarWinds products
  • Upgrade licenses
• Orion Platform Basics
  • Learn more about basic functions of the Orion Web Console: how to log in, view events, syslogs, traps, reports or alerts.
  • Log in to the Orion Web Console
  • Review events
  • Review syslogs
  • Review SNMP traps
  • Get alerts
  • Generate reports
  • Common Orion Platform features
• Add devices for monitoring and manage monitored devices
  • Specify devices for monitoring and the information you need about them. Add entities or discover your network. You can use ICMP, WMI, SNMP, or agents to monitor your network.
  • Discover and add devices
  • Add single nodes
  • Discover devices on your network
  • Use agents to poll your devices
  • Manage monitored devices
• Manage user accounts
  • Information on how to create and configure user accounts for the Orion Web Console.
  • Manage Orion Web Console user accounts
• Review Performance Analysis dashboards
  • Visually correlate historical time series data from multiple Orion Platform products and entity types in a single view.
  • Troubleshoot environmental issues with PerfStack
• View monitored entities on maps
  • See your network devices on maps in the Orion Web Console.
  • Map options in the Orion Web Console
  • Orion Maps
  • Worldwide Map
  • Network Atlas
• Monitor additional metrics and devices
  • Monitor hardware health, virtual environment, or quality of experience, cloud, containers, UCS devices, and more.
  • Monitor hardware health
  • Monitor virtual environments
  • Use packet analysis sensors to see packet-level traffic
  • Monitor cloud instances and VMs
  • Monitor containers
  • Integrate ServiceNow
  • Monitor Cisco UCS devices
• Customize your Orion Web Console
  • Customize the user interface, create custom properties, create groups and depedencies, or set thresholds for your environment.
  • Customize dashboards, views, widgets, or charts
  • Create custom properties
  • Create groups and dependencies
  • Specify thresholds for monitored metrics
• Expand the Orion Platform functionality or scale your deployment
  • Provide failover protection with High availability, scale your deployment, and optimize your deployment.
  • Use SolarWinds High Availability
  • Scale your environment
  • Optimize your deployment
  • Manage additional polling engines
  • Troubleshoot the SolarWinds Orion database