SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software, announced its latest virtualization and storage free tool, SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor, to help target storage IO problems caused by server virtualization in real time.

“If a user is experiencing a slow response time on a virtual machine (VM), SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor can quickly and easily give a snapshot report into how VMware datastores are performing direct from the user’s desktop in real time,” said Jonathan Reeve, SolarWinds Sr. Director of Product Management. “Using this data, the user can then determine whether there is a VM issue or if the issue is related to storage.”

SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor connects to VMware vSphere and monitors the top five host to datastore total storage response times, providing users with the top five virtual machines (VM) using the connections from an IO (IOPs) perspective.

For iSCSI and Fibre channel datastore types, SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor breaks down the total response time into “kernel latency” (time spent in the host) and “device latency” (time spent in the SAN).

SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor provides:

* At-a-glance insight into host to datastore connections with the worst response times, and the busiest VMs using those connections

* A breakdown of the datastore including type, and device versus kernel latency to understand if the bottleneck is in the host or the SAN

In addition, SolarWinds Storage Manager and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager integrate to provide visibility from the virtualization layer all the way to the underlying physical storage.