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SolarWinds Virtualization Manager vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SolarWinds Virtualization M...
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Virtualization Management Tools (7th)
VMware vSphere
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
457
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Virtualization solutions, they serve different purposes. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is designed for Virtualization Management Tools and holds a mindshare of 10.1%, up 8.8% compared to last year.
VMware vSphere, on the other hand, focuses on Server Virtualization Software, holds 18.1% mindshare, up 18.3% since last year.
Virtualization Management Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager10.1%
VMware Aria Operations27.1%
IBM Turbonomic11.9%
Other50.9%
Virtualization Management Tools
Server Virtualization Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSphere18.1%
Hyper-V17.2%
Proxmox VE13.9%
Other50.800000000000004%
Server Virtualization Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ravi Khanchandani - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder Director at Techsa Services
Optimizing virtual environments by reclaiming and allocating resources efficiently
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization. It provides me with recommendations for resource allocation, indicating if a virtual machine is under-provisioned or over-provisioned. This allows me to reclaim resources, such as reducing the number of CPU cores or RAM, which is beneficial. Its capacity planning feature is also very useful for me. The GUI is highly simplified, cutting across various virtualization platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix environments.
IA
IT Director at Def Industry
Has improved infrastructure monitoring and resource management but requires better support and cost efficiency
The high availability feature's resilience is not bad, but it could be better. For example, whenever you lose any hardware, you will have interruptions on the services, and it reboots again on the other hardware host which is available at the crash time. That's good, but we would prefer to have zero downtime instead of the rebooting on the other server. We would prefer to have a zero downtime always-on configuration. VMware vSphere has a built-in feature called Fault Tolerance, but it's very limited for very limited VMs or very limited core count or CPU count, so it's not so useful for all the environment because of the limitations. The Fault Tolerance (FT) feature is very limited to very little core counts or very little VM counts, so you can't run the Fault Tolerance for all the servers or all the VMs, and that's very bad. If VMware vSphere could have any kind of built-in patch management environment with a repository, offline repository option, with test, non-production, and production environment separated, this would be perfect. Management of patch management with operating systems and including third-party applications which are running on the servers would enhance the VMware vSphere environment. VMware vSphere is very expensive. The worst aspect of VMware vSphere is the price. I can't tell you the exact cost at this time because the other team members in my teams are working on it, but I remember that the prices are very high. VMware vSphere is easy to scale, but it could be better, similar to a Kubernetes environment. It should have an automatic scale-out feature when the load gets high; if it gets some scale out automatically, it would be better than this, similar to Kubernetes or OpenShift.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"Having a virtualized infrastructure and being able to bring up Windows, Linux, and VMware within a virtualized environment brings more technology into the classroom. Without it, we couldn't do what we do."
"The redundancy, the failover, the ability to stay up and running 24/7, all the various tools that are in there, high-availability, DRS, are very critical to us."
"The solution allows for very good virtualization."
"The product offers good stability."
"I think that the solution is perfect. It's the best on the market."
"Overall, it is a pretty good solution. We do not have to worry about upgrading the versions that people use for our in-house software. We just create ThinApps, and as soon as they log in, they always get the upgraded version. This part really works well for us."
"Valuable features really depend on different projects. We are using the traditional infrastructure based on VMware vSphere. We are also using the high availability (HA) and Distributed Switch features to extend our network and switch between different hosts. The VMotion and SVMotion features are very essential for us to relocate the storage of virtual machines to different storage or vSANs. We are using VMotion and SVMotion features several times of the day. We are also using another VMware product to replicate a lot of solutions to a second replication site."
"It is a very dependable solution. Its performance is very good, and it is also easy to manage and implement."
 

Cons

"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."
"Inability to get to a single hypervisor environment to support a container environment."
"OS templates should be readily available, so there is no need to get an OS separately. Only the activation part should be different, which is not presently available due to the need to get the OS from a different location, then create VMs."
"There needs to be more integration overall. That would be quite helpful."
"The setup is easy. However, the configuration expansion can be difficult. The full implementation took three to four days. This included the move from physical servers to virtual ones."
"There is definitely room for improvement and that improvement should be in the licensing and the simplicity of procuring additional licenses or additional VMware products. Right now, it's very complex."
"I would like to see the UI incorporating all of the functionality that the thick client had."
"Sentencing has changed a lot."
"I would like to see improvements in simplifying automation, cloud native deployment, administration, and fault resolution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."
"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."
"The pricing is too expensive. The reason why we implemented Hyper-V is because of the licensing costs. They are way too high."
"We pay for the solution on an annual basis. There are no additional fees other than the standard license."
"VMware is consistently expensive and their pricing arrogance is what will drive us and other customers away."
"There is a perpetual license for this solution and the support is a yearly subscription."
"I'm satisfied with the VMware vSphere price. They have a bundle that is priced well. However, any advantage feature is very costly."
"Its licensing is typically yearly. From a value standpoint, it's worth it."
"I think it's a fair price. We are using it on the production side, and everything is good from our experience. That's why I would say that the cost isn't too high. However, it would always be nice if it was cheaper."
"We would like it to be affordable to use the manage services on the cloud, then let VMware manage it and have AWS a part of it. This would make the easier transition from on-premise to cloud and be of value."
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Consultant, ASEAN at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
May 10, 2015
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Healthcare Company
9%
Non Profit
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business175
Midsize Enterprise137
Large Enterprise256
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
This solution delivers significant cost savings, especially from a capacity perspective. Consistent monitoring is essential in a virtualization environment, and Virtualization Manager, or VMAN as i...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems.
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
We predominantly work with financial organizations such as large banks, stock exchanges, and insurance companies, as well as IT-enabled services (ITES). I use SolarWinds Virtualization Manager at o...
What is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platforms. It is used a lot inside virtualization platforms like VMware VSphere. It pr...
Why KVM??? Help please!
We use VMware and KVM. We find that KVM is a lot simpler to use and it provides the virtualization we need for Linux and Windows. For us, VMware does not offer any advantage. Moreover, KVM is free.
Proxmox vs ESXi/vSphere: What is your experience?
For me the biggest impact is the cost of licensing in the case of VMware despite its overall intuitiveness and ease of handling and management. However, KVM-based Open Source solutions are becoming...
 

Also Known As

SolarWinds VMAN
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elliot Health System
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Nutanix, Veeam Software and others in Virtualization Management Tools. Updated: January 2026.
879,927 professionals have used our research since 2012.