Today, SolarWinds announced the release of its latest, award-winning SolarWinds Virtualization Manager – a comprehensive and affordable virtualization management solution.  The technology was acquired with the acquisition of Hyper9 back in January of 2011.

The product has come a long way since the acquisition, but with the latest release, the company is now ready to expand beyond the confines of a VMware vSphere environment by moving into and adding support for Microsoft Hyper-V.  Finally, Hyper-V users will have the chance to add this comprehensive management software into their environments... but even more important, VMware vSphere shops who have been dabbling with or moving ahead into a heterogeneous virtual data center can now manage that environment from a single console.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager now delivers integrated VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V capacity planning, VM sprawl control, performance monitoring, configuration management, and chargeback automation, helping to alleviate user pain points around troubleshooting, downtime and resource utilization across server and storage hypervisors.

The unified approach makes it easy to take control of a virtualized environment regardless of size, taking users from the early stages of virtualization deployment all the way to implementation of private cloud initiatives and IT-as-a-Service.

One of the key areas that SolarWinds was able to enhance the original Hyper9 product was with the additional and deeper views into the storage of a hypervisor deployment. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager integrates with SolarWinds Storage Manager, allowing users to go beyond the datastore stats, to the logical unit number (LUN) for both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V and ultimately the physical disk level stats, providing full VM-to-spindle visibility for simpler and faster troubleshooting.

SolarWinds recently conducted a survey on private cloud management in December 2011 and received responses from nearly 65 IT professionals. The survey found that nearly 85 percent of users deploy VMware’s hypervisor, followed closely by Microsoft Hyper-V at 55 percent.

“We are seeing more customers adding a second hypervisor to their virtualization mix or choosing to migrate to another, to maximize potential cost savings and avoid vendor lock-in,” said Sanjay Castelino, VP & market leader, SolarWinds. “To that end, we’ve added Microsoft Hyper-V support to SolarWinds Virtualization Manager to give organizations the flexibility to manage one or both VMware and Hyper-V hypervisors as they make business-critical decisions around their virtual environments, and, for many, build out a foundation for private cloud.”

Pricing and Availability

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is available now and pricing starts at $2,995 (USD), with the first year of maintenance included. For more information, visit the SolarWinds website, download a free 30-day evaluation, or call 866.530.8100.