What is virtual machine management software?

Virtual machine (VM) management software refers to any tool that helps users manage, monitor, and optimize their virtual environments.

Virtual machines are a popular computing option for those looking to consolidate their systems and keep up with a rapidly changing digital landscape. Infrastructure virtualization is designed to create a virtual replica of the host system, which can help improve resource efficiency and save on hardware costs.

As with computers or servers, virtualized machines should also be monitored to ensure optimal performance. The goal of virtual machine management software is to help you better allocate resources, make troubleshooting more efficient, generate insights, and improve operations.

Some of the functions of virtual machine management software include:

Virtual machine management software facilitates more effective troubleshooting. Virtual machines are fast, agile, and scalable, but they’re sometimes difficult to manage because they can easily spread out across a system. This can impact your ability to easily perform VM troubleshooting, because you may be required to search through the entire system to find the root cause of performance issues in the middle of a slowdown. Virtual machine management software is designed to facilitate end-to-end virtual infrastructure monitoring, so you can investigate the health of your environment and more easily pinpoint issues before slowdowns happen. 

Effective virtual server management helps users keep track of everything on their systems. An effective virtual machine management solution should offer comprehensive VM monitoring and alerting. A virtual infrastructure manager’s alerting system is designed to ensure you never miss an issue. You can create custom thresholds and critical warning alerts to meet your specific needs, so you’ll be the first to know when something is wrong. By setting alerts for what you want and not setting alerts for what you don’t want, virtual machine management software can keep you from getting lost in a sea of unnecessary notifications.

Virtual infrastructure monitoring gives users critical visibility into multiple hypervisors. Microsoft^® Hyper-V, VMware^® vSphere, Nutanix^® AHV, on-premises, hybrid, or cloud—virtual machine management software is built to handle it all. With a comprehensive virtual machine management tool, you’ll be able to manage your virtual machines and hypervisors from a single interface, which means no more jumping from dashboard to dashboard to look at the performance of each hypervisor. 

Why is virtual machine management software important?

Virtual machine management software is important because virtual environments have specific needs and require a specialized approach to virtualized infrastructure monitoring. When network slowdowns happen, or resources aren’t properly distributed, users need a way to gain visibility into their systems and find out where the problem is. 

Since virtual machines are partitioned, it can be difficult to establish across-the-board performance visibility. Virtual machine management software is designed to help users drill down into performance issues, optimize performance, and speed up troubleshooting by automating some of the most time-consuming processes involved in virtual machine management. 

One of the many advantages of a virtual machine is that it can run concurrently with many other virtual instances on the same physical device. Unfortunately, this means if the underlying hardware slows down or stops working, the virtual machines operating on it will also stop working. By using virtual machine management software, users can help ensure high performance levels and, if necessary, provision more resources to support the load to prevent performance issues. 

Virtual machine management software requirements

One-click virtualization management. Due to the on-demand nature of virtual environments, you’ll want a virtual machine management system built to consolidate performance metrics into one place. The tool should offer insights into the performance, usage, and capacity of your virtualized environments, including hosts, containers, clusters, vSANs, and other datastores, wherever they’re located. With the right virtual infrastructure monitoring software, you can more easily resolve VM issues from one dashboard without needing to log in to each hypervisor. You should also be able to monitor your cloud, on-premises, IaaS, and hybrid environments from the same console.

VM recommendations. It can be difficult to figure out where to start when it comes to virtual server management. If possible, choose a management solution with smart recommendations for actions that can be selected individually or in batches—whether to run right away or to schedule for a later date and time—with actionable intelligence capabilities to help you optimize VM performance and resource allocation. 

Virtualization alerts. Look for a virtual machine management tool built to identify and notify you about issues related to vSphere, AHV, Hyper-V, Azure, and AWS. These active virtualization alerts should be broken down into categories like critical, serious, warning, and informational. Look for intuitive dashboards for performance, storage, and capacity planning that can provide quick insights. 

VM sprawl control. VM sprawl, which occurs when a virtual machine is running idly in the background and eating up bandwidth, is a common pain point with monitoring virtual machines. Your virtual machine management solution should be able to power off idle VMs and reclaim resources by deleting powered-off VMs, orphaned VMDK files, and snapshots. 

An embedded capacity planning tool. Virtual machine management solutions should also be able to predict CPU, memory, storage, and network needs for hypervisors like VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V. It’s helpful if you can run modeling scenarios to learn how to support new workload or run a checkup to ensure resources are in alignment with current usage needs. 

How virtual machine management software works

Virtual machine management software works by making it easier for users to know what’s going on in their virtual environment to help ensure the virtual machines, applications, and servers within an environment are efficiently working at—but not over—capacity.

To conceptualize the important work virtual machine management software does, consider this example: suppose you work in a large building with many offices, and you’re in charge of locking all the doors, turning off all the lights, and shutting down all the computers every night. One way to accomplish these tasks is to go room by room to check each door is locked, the lights are off, and computers are powered down—this manual, tedious work could potentially take all night to complete. 

Now, suppose you were faced with these same tasks, but your large office building was outfitted with a solution that could automatically lock the doors, shut off the lights, and power down the computers. It would save you a lot of time each day and free you up for other tasks. 

In this example, your virtual environment is the large office building and virtual machine management software is the automated solution. Virtual machine management software is built to allow users to deploy all virtual infrastructure management processes across an entire environment from one console, which saves time, increases operation efficiency, and helps ensure resources are properly being used. 

How to choose a virtual machine management software

When it comes to choosing a virtualized infrastructure monitoring solution, look for a virtual machine management tool with these capabilities and functions:

1. Monitor hardware health status. Since multiple virtual machines often depend on one host, admins should actively work to maintain the health of hardware.
2. Track capacity usage and resource allocation. Datastores are the backbone of virtual machines. It’s critical for users to ensure datastores are being used properly, so virtual machines can continue to efficiently provision resources. 
3. Calculate memory ballooning. This occurs when the hypervisor reclaims unused memory from idle VMs, indicating a memory shortage.
4. Troubleshoot memory swapping. When a vSphere server switches to a “hard” or “low” state, depending on need, to better keep up with memory usage.
5. Consider network connectivity. Sometimes a virtual machine is slow because of a laggy network connection and not a misuse of resources. Choose a virtual machine management software that accounts for network issues to cover all your bases when troubleshooting.
6. Manage VM snapshots. Snapshots, like the name suggests, are pictures of the entire state of a virtual machine at any given time, including memory, settings, and disk status. Your virtual machine management software solution of choice should store old snapshots in addition to generating new ones, so you can easily monitor how your VM environment has changed over time. 
7. See overall resource usage. It can be helpful to approach virtual machine optimization by working backwards. If you investigate resource usage from the outside in, you can more easily pinpoint the virtual machines that need more resources.
8. Control VM sprawl. Idle or orphaned virtual machines can siphon off vital resources from active VMs that could use them. Choose a virtual infrastructure manager that helps control VM sprawl. 
9. Consider VM disk read metrics. Disk throughput and disk IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) metrics can say a lot about virtual disk health. For example, if the virtual disk doesn’t have enough processing power, everything using the disk—from applications to other virtual machines—will slow down. 
10. Identify VM Wait and Ready times. A VM can exist in one of four states: run, wait, co-stop, and ready. Knowing which state a VM is in offers critical insight into performance issues. 

What is SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)?

SolarWinds^® Virtualization Manager is an enterprise-grade virtual machine management tool built to combine virtual machine monitoring, capacity planning, performance management, and optimization. Managing a virtual environment can be challenging without the right tools, but VMAN can help. 

VMAN can let you more easily answer key questions like, “Where did the storage go?” and “Are disks over-provisioned?” With VMAN, you can plan for future workloads with synthetic model capacity planning scenarios to help you get an overview of all possible options. For instance, if you’re unintentionally wasting CPU power, you can start reclaiming wasted CPU by executing recommendations for over and under-allocated CPUs. 

Other virtual machine management benefits include:

• Faster troubleshooting. Gain total visibility into VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in the cloud. See how your VMs are connected to applications, servers, and storage infrastructure. 
• Cloud infrastructure monitoring. Monitor and alert on Azure and AWS infrastructure metrics, all in the same dashboard used to monitor on-premises or hybrid VMs. 
• Streamlined approach. The VMAN console is designed to execute a range of VM monitoring and management actions without moving to another tool. You can trigger actions manually or through customized alerts and scripts. 
• Reduced overhead costs. Reclaim virtual resources by leveraging VM sprawl alerts and custom recommendations. Use VMAN to automatically identify ways to free up processing and storage resources.  

What makes VMAN virtual machine management software different

VMAN offers a range of useful VM management features, including integration with PerfStack^™ and AppStack^™ dashboards.

PerfStack is built to allow you to drag, drop, and easily overlay performance metrics from systems data. Track data from multiple sources—including network, virtualization, storage, or database metrics—onto a single chart. 

This feature leverages intelligent data correlation and analysis to help you predict, prioritize, and fix issues before they affect end users. You can also use PerfStack to speed your root cause analysis—simply correlate performance spikes with changes and events like VM migrations or configuration changes. 

AppStack is designed to visually map out your entire virtual environment—each node, application, cluster, and datastore is displayed with icons to show critical issues in need of your attention. Having your environment visually represented can make it easier to drill down root causes and quickly locate issues. 

If you’re looking for a virtual infrastructure manager that fulfills all these requirements and more, download a free 30-day trial of SolarWinds VMAN today.