SolarWinds Makes Virtualization Work

Beseiged as I am with the ongoing avalanche of press releases describing advanced cloud products, it was refreshing to do a briefing with SolarWinds, which is all about implementing that aging, commoditized, pick-and-shovel technology known as virtualization. The company is currently focusing on its new SolarWinds Virtualization Manager 4.0 product, the meat and potatoes of which consists of VMware-only tools for capacity management, VM sprawl control, performance monitoring, configuration management, and chargeback automation.

"A lot of people are still building out their virtualization," said John Reeve, senior director, product management with SolarWinds, and he could not be more correct, so SolarWinds, which was founded in 1999 and has some 93,000 customers, is guiding them through a three-step process designed to make them public- and private-cloud-ready. The sweet spot in this customer base is the group of midmarket and enterprise departments that is approximately 30 percent virtualized.

Reeve stressed that Virtualization Manager 4.0 is based on a unified approach to virtualization that integrates key components rather than seeking them out individually from siloed environments. The key component he keeps coming back to is capacity management. "Capacity management continues to be a very big issue," Reeves said, adding that it is so important, and so dynamic that it can no longer be budgeted for on an annual basis, since requirements are fluid and system purchases need to be planned for well in advance.

SolarWinds caters to capacity management concerns via its many dashboards that posit what-if scenarios that help users understand the problems they may face, and possible solutions they can implement. Other dashboard application include helping users understand how they need to configure their systems to optimize vSphere 5 licensing scenarios, and how they can get the most out of desktop virtualization infrastructures.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 09/23/2011 at 12:48 PM