SolarWinds is making performance monitoring for VMware environments a reality. The release of a new free tool, SolarWinds VM Monitor, and an update to its flagship Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) will allow IT professionals to take advantage of the key characteristics of SolarWinds’ solutions – enterprise-class performance combined with affordability, quick deployment and ease of use – to manage and monitor their virtual deployments.

Businesses, both large and small, are moving to virtualization in order to consolidate their server and network infrastructure, save money, and improve overall uptime and flexibility. These virtual deployments add additional monitoring challenges to an already complex network environment. Many affordable network management solutions lack the ability to extend monitoring to performance and availability of virtual machines (VMs), potentially impacting critical business services including e-mail, web applications, and ERP. If performance and fault monitoring for these environments is costly and complicated, IT organizations will struggle to realize the full potential of a virtual environment.

“Ten years ago, we sought to create a new approach for network management solutions based on the combination of enterprise-class performance, affordability and ease of deployment and use. Today, more than 50,000 customers, from small businesses to the Fortune 500, trust our solutions to help them monitor and manage critical networks,” said Kenny Van Zant, chief product strategist. “As the adoption of VMware environments continues to grow, we have extended our approach to virtualization, giving network engineers and administrators the ability to make the most of their virtualization investment.”

SolarWinds VM Monitor delivers an intuitive, desktop dashboard that continuously monitors a VMware ESX server and the associated virtual machines by providing real-time monitoring of ESX health indicators. SolarWinds’ free tool, available for download today, makes it easy to:

• Quickly check the health of a single VMware ESX server by monitoring CPU and memory utilization, number of virtual machines configured and running, and much more
• View detailed individual virtual machine health statistics including VM name, IP address, VM state, as well as processor, memory and disk usage.
• Leverage best practice thresholds to begin monitoring virtualized servers out-of-the-box
• Prevent performance degradation by checking threshold specific indicators to remediate issues

When users are ready to expand monitoring to their full VMware virtual environment, Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) enables network engineers to monitor thousands of VMware ESX servers, as well as associated virtual machine instances, and VMware VirtualCenter. With this update, Orion NPM can read host MIB information from each VMware ESX server and its corresponding virtual machines, detailing statistics such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk usage, and much more. The latest release also offers ESX-specific alerts and reports. Orion Network Performance Monitor offers:

• Monitoring and analysis of real-time, in-depth network performance metrics for routers, switches, physical servers, ESX servers, virtual machines, and any other SNMP-enabled devices
• Do-it-yourself deployment that allows users to be up and running in about an hour
• Highly intuitive, customizable web interface with point-and-click simplicity that supports multiple views including cutting-edge maps and global Top 10 lists
• Advanced alerting for correlated events, sustained conditions, and complex combinations of device states
• Scalability to accommodate growth and management needs with Orion Enterprise Operations Console,  additional polling engines, and additional web servers
• Modules to expand monitoring of NetFlow traffic analysis and VoIP performance, wireless devices, applications and servers

Users can find more information, tips from SolarWinds company experts as well as peer support and perspectives on Orion NPM, at Thwack, the SolarWinds online community. Integrated links within the products give SolarWinds customers the ability to search product forums, post questions, exchange custom scripts and templates, and immediately access valuable knowledge and resources directly from the community’s more than 18,000 members.