No results found. Try different keywords.
Enter at least 3 characters to search...
Home » Network License » SolarWinds » Virtualization manager (VM)
A SolarWinds VM license is what activates virtualization monitoring, performance analysis, and capacity optimization features within the Orion Platform. After you buy it, everything gets managed through the SolarWinds License Manager, where all your entitlements are recorded and tracked. Each license record includes the basics: customer account info, subscription dates, edition type, licensed unit counts (VM instances, hosts, datastores, polling engines), and any feature modules you picked up. You can register and assign the license right through the web interface. Most of the time it’ll assign itself automatically to your Orion server, but if you’re running multiple polling engines across different sites, you can distribute things manually to match your environment.
Got an air-gapped or highly secure network? SolarWinds VM supports offline activation using a UDI file (Unique Device Identifier). Here’s how it works: generate the UDI from your target Orion server, move it to a system with internet access, upload it to the SolarWinds Customer Portal, and grab the key file they send back. Import that key into your License Manager and you’re done, no internet connection needed on the production side, which keeps everything compliant for restricted deployments.
The licensing is subscription-based with a fixed term. During that period, you get continuous access to updates, new features, and SolarWinds support. If your virtual environment grows and you need more monitoring capacity, license stacking lets you combine subscriptions so you can handle larger VMware or Hyper-V environments without rebuilding. Once your SolarWinds VM license is activated, whether online or offline, you’ve got full visibility into host and guest performance metrics, resource utilization, and storage trends.
Once SolarWinds VM is running, you get complete visibility across your virtualized infrastructure. It monitors performance metrics for both hosts and guest machines in real time, tracking the critical stuff: CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization. This helps you spot resource contention, over-committed hosts, or performance issues before they start affecting end users, which is exactly what you want when you’re managing a virtualized environment.
The platform integrates directly with VMware vCenter and Microsoft Hyper-V, giving you unified dashboards and detailed topology views of your virtual setup. When something goes wrong, you can quickly pinpoint bottlenecks, analyze trends, and see how virtual performance correlates with physical hardware health, all from the same Orion console. No more jumping between multiple tools to piece together what’s happening.
One of the more useful features is predictive analytics and capacity planning. SolarWinds VM forecasts future resource needs based on your utilization patterns, so you’re not caught off guard when you suddenly need more capacity. Automated alerts let your team get ahead of performance issues, and the reporting tools make capacity management and SLA tracking much simpler. When you combine it with other SolarWinds modules, you get end-to-end visibility by correlating virtual performance data with network and application metrics.
The bottom line is faster troubleshooting, better capacity forecasting, and the ability to optimize your virtual environments without constantly firefighting. That means better uptime and lower operational costs, which makes a real difference when you’re managing hundreds of VMs.
When you’re ready to purchase SolarWinds VM, start by figuring out how many virtual machines, hosts, or datastores you need to monitor. You can request a quote through the official SolarWinds store or work with an authorized partner or reseller. Before you reach out, it helps to know which edition type fits your needs, your instance or host count, how many polling engines are involved, what support tier makes sense, and how long you want the subscription to last.
The SolarWinds VM price depends on several things: the size of your environment, which edition you select, subscription term length, and any optional feature modules you add. Multi-year subscriptions or volume purchases usually get you better cost efficiency. And if your infrastructure grows over time, license stacking lets you scale monitoring capacity without having to re-deploy everything from scratch.
After you complete the purchase, the entitlement shows up in your License Manager. You can activate it online right away, or if you’re in an isolated or regulated environment, use the offline UDI-based workflow we covered earlier. Once activation is done, the system syncs your monitored VM and host capacities, and you can start getting performance visibility and optimization insights immediately.
Thinking about testing it first? Organizations can start with a free trial to kick the tires before committing. The SolarWinds VM Solution page has deployment details and compatibility guides if you want to check technical requirements. For current pricing, the SolarWinds VM price page has the information you need, or you can get quotes directly from partner channels. The pricing is pretty transparent, and with flexible subscription options, it’s easier to size things correctly and scale as your infrastructure grows.
