We recently commissioned Principled Technologies to conduct an independent lab test comparing Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition, with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. Foglight was the clear leader in all three categories of functionality tested: storage optimization, virtual machine memory and CPU optimization, and change management.
In my first two blog posts in this series, I covered storage optimization and optimizing virtual machine memory and CPU. In this third and final post, I’ll review change management. Specifically, how Foglight for Virtualization tracks VM changes, identifies and fixes performance degradation issues, enables you to undo changes (revert to a previous state), offers as much or as little automation as you choose, and provides you with key metrics throughout each of these processes – functionality that SolarWinds Virtualization Manager does not have.
Does your virtualized infrastructure make the grade?
With Foglight, you’re not only able to track VM changes over time and provide an up-to-the-minute, holistic overview of your virtualized environment – you’re also able to track VM performance and assign an overall health rating to each VM based on aggregated virtual hardware resource metrics. Once a health grade is assigned, Foglight automatically correlates the VM performance rating with changes, making it easy for you to identify performance issues that result from specific changes. Foglight also enables you to remediate these issues with just a few clicks.
How does your virtual management solution measure up?
Unlike Foglight, SolarWinds doesn’t enable you to track environment changes or VM changes and revert to an earlier state. That means you must manually review logs, identify the changes made, and then roll back any problematic CPU/memory changes one VM at a time - a time-consuming and potentially error-prone process.
Time is on your side with Foglight.
If you look at the chart below, you’ll see how reverting changes on 10 VMs with SolarWinds took more than half an hour, compared to under a minute with Foglight. That’s more than 42 times slower than Foglight. What’s more, it took 52 steps to do it with SolarWinds versus 23 steps using Foglight. That’s a lot of time that you could be spending on more strategic efforts.
Figure 11 from Principled Technologies test report
Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition allows you to visualize, analyze, plan, and optimize your entire virtual environment, with “end-to-everything” performance monitoring and management. Read this report to see the details on how Foglight for Virtualization outperforms SolarWinds Virtualization Manager in side-by-side tests.
*Based on October 2015 Principled Technologies report commissioned by Dell, “Virtualization-Management Comparison: Foglight for Virtualization vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager,” comparing a trial version of Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition to an online demonstration version of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. Claims are based on features within the SolarWinds online demo, review of publicly available SolarWinds documentation, and customer verification.
