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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 (6th)
VMware vSphere
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
459
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 10.5%, up 9.2% compared to last year.
VMware vSphere, on the other hand, focuses on Server Virtualization Software, holds 19.2% mindshare, up 16.5% since last year.
Virtualization Management Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager10.5%
VMware Aria Operations24.7%
IBM Turbonomic16.6%
Other48.199999999999996%
Virtualization Management Tools
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSphere19.2%
Hyper-V19.5%
Proxmox VE10.9%
Other50.4%
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

"This product is so helpful out-of-the-box."
"Alerting expands, and makes, our monitoring and management much more efficient."
"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."
"Virtualization manager’s cost analysis comparison report identified areas in which specific customers were being grossly undercharged for their resource consumption levels, as compared to rates available through AWS."
"If you’re looking to get a lot more insight into your virtualization environment and more than just basic information, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is the choice you should make."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."
"All platforms are good as long as we manage the SLA."
"From my point of view, it's one of the most stable and scalable technologies on the market, and when it comes to virtualization it's probably the very best there is."
"The biggest advantage is that it cuts costs."
"This is one of the best products as a virtualization platform."
"High availability is particularly valuable to my company because I know that if one of my hosts should fail, we will experience minimal interruption."
"As an end-user, I would say it has allowed us to have the flexibility of moving around our workloads on different machines, and not having to worry if anything is down."
"The ability to to virtualize systems and run those virtual workloads with a fewer number of servers is tremendous."
"The most important feature is the ability to balance the servers with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). It is a very useful feature and should be mandatory for vSphere to have but it is only available in the enterprise edition. It should be available in all versions."
 

Cons

"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"The UI is a little cumbersome at first, but the more you use it and get accustomed to it, the simpler it becomes."
"Out of the box support for a wider array of hardware vendor/device-specific SNMP mibs could be improved upon."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"Adhoc reporting takes time to get used to – due mainly to the fact that the team I am on are all admins, and not necessarily accustomed to query reporting in the manner utilized by Solarwinds Virtualization Manager."
"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"For managing many ESXi's at once vCenter is required. when the number of ESXi is smaller, it is not practical to have a vCenter server."
"They should improve a lot of the functionality because normally it's half of a product."
"If they improve on the knowledge base and documentation, it would be extremely helpful."
"I'd like to see small VMDKs in the next version since Hyper-V provides that option."
"Like VSAN for instance, a lot of the storage vendors that are really going for it to be on the VSAN HCL, and unfortunately some of the RAID controllers are not on that HCL, and a lot of times people don't know that."
"The technical support is good. However, it could be more seamless when it comes to chat support and lower response times."
"They can lower the price of its license."
"vSphere itself is great when you don't need to make updates, but any time you have to touch it, unfortunately there is always a little bit of a fight to get it to do what you want."
 

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."
"Licensing fees are not paid yearly, or monthly."
"The licensing could be lower."
"The price of this solution is mid-range."
"If you go with a standard license, it's very affordable."
"VMware licensing and pricing are a bit more expensive compared to others, like Hyper-V. However, you get what you pay for."
"Purchase only the cheaper solution with support. I don’t recommend high-end licenses."
"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."
"I find it highly expensive."
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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
17%
Healthcare Company
9%
Government
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
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 Business177
Midsize Enterprise138
Large Enterprise259
 

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, IBM and others in Virtualization Management Tools. Updated: April 2026.
894,830 professionals have used our research since 2012.