At the current economy, it seems good free tools are just getting to be more and more popular. SolarWinds have released quite few useful ones lately & I thought I will list them below for the benefits of my readers who is hunting for such free tools:

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SolarWinds Free VM Console

The SolarWinds Free VM Console enables you to bounce your virtual machines without ever logging into VMware Plus, you can track up/down status, take snapshots, and restart VMs even if you are not a VMware administrator. Be a VM superhero with the ability to:

• Shutdown & restart VMs without logging into vCenter or vSphere
• Take snapshots of your VMs before bouncing them
• Get end-to-end visibility into your VMware environment from vCenter through ESX hosts to VM guests
• Track the up/down status of your VMs without logging into VMware apps

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SolarWinds Free Storage Response Time Monitor

SolarWinds Storage Response Time Monitor makes keeping track of your storage response times and latency issues easier than ever!

• Get at-a-glance insight into the host to datastore connections with the worst response times and the busiest VMs using those connections
• See a breakdown of the datastore including type and device versus kernel latency

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SolarWinds FREE Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor

SolarWinds Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor makes it easy to keep a close eye on a troublesome interface and monitors the bandwidth usage in real-time!

• Poll bandwidth usage in intervals as frequent as half a  second
• Monitor multiple interfaces simultaneously
• View interface bandwidth usage in an easy-to-understand graph

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SolarWinds FREE VM-to-Cloud Calculator

SolarWinds FREE VM-to-Cloud Calculator quickly discovers all of your virtual machines and estimates what it would cost to move them to the cloud. Get estimates for Amazon EC2™, Windows® Azure™, and Rackspace Cloud Servers™.

• Automatically inventory your virtual machines and capture description, CPU, memory, storage, and count
• Compare cost estimates from Amazon EC2, Windows Azure, and Rackspace Cloud Servers
• Easily generate updated estimates as your virtualized infrastructure evolves

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SolarWinds FREE VM Monitor

Your users don’t care if their apps are running on physical servers or in virtual environments – they just want great performance. That’s why you need our free VM Monitor – an easy-to-use desktop tool that continuously monitors a VMware® ESX Server and its virtual machines.

• Continuously monitor the health of an ESX Server, including CPU, memory utilization, number of machines configured and running, and more
• View detailed VM health statistics statistics including VM name, guest OS, and VM state, as well as processor, memory, and network usage
• Start monitoring within minutes of download using out-of-the-box settings

Although SolarWinds Free VM Monitor is not totally new tool, I thought it was worth mentioning in this post as many will find it interesting enough for a free tool.

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SolarWinds Active Directory tools

SolarWinds Active Directory tools still can be helpful to manage users in a virtual Environment or even in the physical world.

This terrific trio of free tools makes it easier than ever to add and remove users and computers in Microsoft® Active Directory. Save time with Active Directory management tasks!

• Inactive User Account Removal Tool – Enables you to scan Active Directory and optionally remove users who have not logged in for a certain amount of time.
• Inactive Computer Account Removal Tool – Enables you to scan Active Directory and optionally remove computers that are over a certain number of days old.
• User Import Tool – Saves time by giving you the ability to create users in bulk, using a CSV file. You can even specify the attributes.

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I hope each reader find one of these free tools useful.