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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
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 11.1%, up 9.1% compared to last year.
VMware vSphere, on the other hand, focuses on Server Virtualization Software, holds 18.9% mindshare, up 18.1% since last year.
Virtualization Management Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager11.1%
VMware Aria Operations26.0%
IBM Turbonomic12.6%
Other50.3%
Virtualization Management Tools
Server Virtualization Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSphere18.9%
Hyper-V18.2%
Proxmox VE13.0%
Other49.900000000000006%
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."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"The most valuable feature would be enhanced, what we call, Linked Mode to link our disaster recovery site to our primary site across different vCenters, without being required to be broken apart. Meaning, we have identity management and the actual vCenter servers split. We can actually do embedded now, thanks to vSphere 6.7."
"Their command-line tools integrate well with other Microsoft products like PowerShell, so I can manipulate VMs using it."
"The roadmap for the product itself covers all of the features that we are looking for."
"VMware vSphere is more fault tolerant than Nutanix, which stands out as a benefit."
"The vMotion feature is beneficial for online migration of virtual machines from one host to another without downtime."
"Security-Features; vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used. Since we do have so many different departments and areas with a lot of people that need access into the solution, we can use the role-based access controls to really restrict and control who can do what, so everybody can do what they need to do, but they can't do anything else past that."
"vSphere brings the features required for an enterprise class system with a lot of supporting components: An intuitive user experience that simplifies and helps operational management."
"The virtualization, the remote management user interface, and the web console are most valuable."
 

Cons

"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."
"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."
"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"The VMware vSphere app is faster, compared to its web-based client. The web-based client is very slow, freezes, and is challenging to use."
"As we continue to push mission-critical workloads into vSphere, and those workloads are not readily protected at the application layer for availability, continuing to increase the size limitations on FT-protected VMs would be a great advance."
"The performance of the solution could be better and there could be an extra level of security."
"One area for improvement is the documentation, especially after VMware was transferred to Broadcom. Sometimes, it is difficult to find documentation for specific tools and solutions."
"Higher cost than other similar solutions."
"I would like to see improvements in simplifying automation, cloud native deployment, administration, and fault resolution."
"There could be an inbuilt dashboard for reporting purposes."
"I would like to see VMware vSphere provide a centralized patch service on the VMware level, regardless of your operating systems."
 

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."
"You will find the cost is reasonably cheaper."
"It is expensive. Other solutions on the market are free. We had to plan with VMware how many hosts that we needed in order to determine the price."
"The license growth of vSphere depends on the growth of the visual environment and the addition of more hosts."
"The price could improve for the enterprise versions."
"In my opinion, the essential version is a good price."
"Pricing is a little bit on the higher side, compared to other products."
"Pricing is the one "ding" I have against it. Except for VMware vSphere Essentials, it would be pretty challenging for anything but a medium or large size company to use."
"Its price is quite high. VMware licensing is quite costly. You have to pay for the CPU and Threads, but if you want good service, you have to pay the price. Its cost is not more than 1 million for us."
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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%
Non Profit
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
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 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, Veeam Software and others in Virtualization Management Tools. Updated: January 2026.
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