Virtual Machine (VM) Troubleshooting and Performance Issues

Troubleshooting VM performance issues can be an important step in making sure your VMs run smoothly and efficiently. Common VM problems include VM sprawl, data and memory capacity restrictions, data transmission bottlenecks, and inefficient CPU performance. Once virtual machine issues are identified, the second step in troubleshooting is to provide a fix for the problems.

Virtual machine troubleshooting is the process of identifying then fixing issues in a virtual machine using VM performance monitoring and management tools for insights. A VM troubleshooting program should both incorporate issue identification and support your ability to solve the issues. The VM troubleshooting software should also offer IT admins detailed recommendations based on analytics collected by the monitoring system.

Virtual machine troubleshooting is a two-step process: diagnosis, then solution. 

To diagnose VM issues, it’s important to monitor:

• Storage, memory, and CPU performance. VMs provide scalability to computer systems to expand the capabilities of physical units. However, the many moving parts of VMs can take up a great deal of storage and memory on your hardware, and they can slow down your CPU performance with storage expansion and data transmission bottlenecks. 
• Sprawl. The ability to spin up VMs can contribute to a slow but steady “sprawl” of virtual machines on your network. To ensure your resources aren’t being consumed by many virtual machines that exist but aren’t being adequately managed, a VM troubleshooting tool can help provide insights into opportunities to reclaim virtual resources with sprawl monitoring.
• Dependencies. A dependency is essentially the relationship between any aspect of your VM and the corresponding part of your hardware supporting it. Inefficiencies in VM dependencies can be monitored by a comprehensive VM troubleshooting tool. 

Once you’ve used VM troubleshooting to make a diagnosis, the software should also help you solve the issues by providing:

• Analytics. VM troubleshooting would not be complete without a program that offers analytics of your VM’s operations. Solutions to your virtual machine issues like storage, memory, CPU capacity, and integrative functionality can be difficult to find without aggregated analytics. 
• Alerts. For IT admins, alerts are a necessary component of rapid issue mitigation. If storage or memory is quickly running out, applications are vulnerable to functioning slowly or even going down. Built-in, real-time alerts for urgent storage issues can round out a successful VM troubleshooting software.
• Recommendations. Even the most experienced user will occasionally come to a crossroads in deciding how to mitigate a VM roadblock. Troubleshooting virtual machine issues can be greatly strengthened by tools providing automated recommendations based on system analytics.

Virtual machine troubleshooting aims to reduce inefficiencies in your VM operations. Virtual machines can face capacity challenges, data bottlenecks, and inefficient dependency operations. VM troubleshooting allows for full operability of your VMs, which can permit large-scale and complex VMs to run using many moving parts without constant supervision from an IT admin.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is designed to use a robust approach to identifying inefficiencies in your VMs by simultaneously offering real-time solutions to mitigate issues.

For issue identification, SolarWinds VMAN is built with an automatic mapping device, which maps and monitors the dependencies between your virtual objects, your virtual objects, and your hardware. VMAN also includes a monitoring dashboard with intuitive visual analytics, along with a SolarWinds custom Active Alerts setting, which lets you know when VM issues are urgently affecting your unit’s functionality. 

In addition to issue identification, VMAN offers several tools for solutions to VM issues. The SolarWinds PerfStack^™ dashboard is a detailed Orion Platform performance analysis feature, which can help IT admins pinpoint problem areas using performance monitoring information from across tools. VMAN also includes a comprehensive recommendation engine to help diagnose issues detected by VMAN analytics and offer recommendations for how to fix them. VMAN is designed to help ensure admins can troubleshoot VM issues with speed and accuracy.