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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

"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."
"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."
"Alerting expands, and makes, our monitoring and management much more efficient."
"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."
"This product is so helpful out-of-the-box."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."
"It is a very well-supported solution, and it is very flexible; the expansion of its functionality is dynamic."
"Better management of the virtual infrastructure"
"For companies comparing this to Hyper-V, this is still the gold VM solution."
"It's extremely simple. Installing the ESXi is a piece of cake and then putting servers on there is really simple and having HA and building a cluster for our VM servers. It's very easy."
"Accessibility and the ease of use is unparalleled."
"The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton."
"The interface is good, and it is easy to configure."
"I think in our own way, it has made the administration a lot easier, reduced maintenance time and made us more flexible in terms of large and quick deployments."
 

Cons

"I had some stability issues. I lost my environment."
"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"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 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."
"An improvement could be in terms of keeping up with the upgrades. The upgrades could be set in an automated way so that the newer features don't require you to manually update, or you get an option to update automatically. This would be a useful enhancement."
"So far, we haven't used technical support a lot but I would rate it a three out of five. They have to earn my trust."
"The ability to manage the underlying infrastructure is very poorly thought out and implemented."
"It would be ideal if they could integrate billing software so that clients can customize it directly on the virtual machine."
"I'd like to see small VMDKs in the next version since Hyper-V provides that option."
"The ability to run ARM based VMs on an x86 platform for testing purposes would be very useful; even if this is not possible through some form of emulation, the ability to add ARM hypervisors to vSphere environments would be very useful."
"I would like to see the UI incorporating all of the functionality that the thick client had."
"Centralized management could be better. A server can only be managed by one vCenter."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."
"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."
"I'm not a pricing or budgeting person, but I know that its price is a little bit high, and they can consider reviewing it. Its price is probably the highest in this domain."
"I miss the Enterprise tier. When they went to Enterprise Plus, it increased the price. I was one of the guys that operated well inside the Enterprise tier. I paid a little bit more than standard but I got a lot more features. Enterprise Plus has a lot of things that I'll never use. So when they chopped that tier out, they kneecapped me."
"vSphere has improved our organization by allowing us to deliver rock solid stability to our clients in a cost competitive fashion."
"The price is high, but you get back a lot."
"There is a standard license required for this solution."
"As the vSphere platform allows for a variety of additions, it is quite good."
"It is very expensive as compared to other competitive hypervisor solutions in the market today. Its competitors are actually more aggressive. Even though most of them are less established solutions, they have started to catch up in functionality and capacity, and their pricing is extremely aggressive."
"This is quite an expensive product, although everything is included in the standard licensing fee."
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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: May 2026.
896,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.