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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 9.7%, up 9.6% compared to last year.
VMware vSphere, on the other hand, focuses on Server Virtualization Software, holds 19.1% mindshare, up 16.2% since last year.
Virtualization Management Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager9.7%
VMware Aria Operations23.7%
IBM Turbonomic17.0%
Other49.6%
Virtualization Management Tools
Server Virtualization Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSphere19.1%
Hyper-V19.8%
Proxmox VE10.4%
Other50.699999999999996%
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 is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."
"This product is so helpful out-of-the-box."
"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."
"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 vMotion in particular I think is the most valuable because this feature provides migrations of virtual machines in case you want to run do maintenance."
"The installation process is very straightforward."
"Most valuable features of vSphere 6.7, for us, at the management level would be: VCHA is a nice redundancy feature that they added in v6.7. I like the quality of life improvements with the VMFS-6 for using auto UNMAP on the data stores. And we really appreciate the improvements to the Clarity UI where we can manage Update Manager (VUM) and our vSAN stack within the modern interface."
"We haven't had any issues with stability."
"The solution is very easy to scale, especially when you are trying to scale resource availability and the management of the solution."
"The product offers a very nice single dashboard for complete management."
"The most valuable feature is vSAN, as it reduces the cost of SAN storage and maintenance."
"Some of the most valuable features are: the ability to Snapshot so that when we do updates we have a layer of protection for simplified rollback; the replication that we can leverage for data center failures and data center downtime; the ease of migrating workloads from physical device to physical device for maintenance that we have to do on physical servers."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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 problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."
"The UI is a little cumbersome at first, but the more you use it and get accustomed to it, the simpler it becomes."
"One of the problems with the solution is the pricing."
"We are provided with a mini dashboard that has been improved in the latest version but it still could be better. The monitoring is now available on the vCenter dashboard and the vROps has been added to the basic version that had to be purchased separately before. A complete dashboard has always been provided with some competitors, such as Nutanix."
"The technical support is good. However, it could be more seamless when it comes to chat support and lower response times."
"The solution is stable. It has some small bugs which are not influencing the main functions but every software has some bugs."
"I would like to see DRS for the GPU machines."
"It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities."
"It could be more scalable."
"It would be nice if it had auto-scaling, no need to select CPU or select database size. Let it auto-scale, let it use the features that VMware has, instead of having to preselect."
 

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."
"VMware is consistently expensive and their pricing arrogance is what will drive us and other customers away."
"Our licensing fees on paid on a yearly basis and the pricing is fine."
"The license is a one-time payment. You buy it once and own it forever, but you must pay for support, which is provided by the vendor, on a yearly basis."
"It is cost effective."
"If you go with a standard license, it's very affordable."
"vSphere has improved our organization by allowing us to deliver rock solid stability to our clients in a cost competitive fashion."
"In my opinion, the price is not cheap, not it is expensive. It's average."
"The cost of the licenses is acceptable and we haven't seen any major increases from the vendor in the time we've been using it."
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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%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing 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.
896,692 professionals have used our research since 2012.