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CloudSphere vs VxRail comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
CloudSphere
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (13th), Cloud Management (29th)
VxRail
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
132
Ranking in other categories
HCI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cloud Migration
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Vibhor Gupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Great discovery, good support, and generally reliable
The area they need to focus most on is the capability of assessment and the landing zones. It’s lacking right now. Cloud transformation has four to five cases, including planning, discovery, assessment, and the MVC, which is called the minimal viable cloud. That comes with the architecture design or landing zone creation, where we will create resources on the cloud which we are provisioning. If we are moving onto the cloud platform, AWS, or zero GCP, we need an account. We need resources to be able to compute the network. Most organizations have their landing zone process and know how to create the resources account, compute the network layer and the security layer. However, this landing zone creation is not there in CloudSphere as a feature. It cannot create any of the cloud providers' accounts or their network security computing as a part of the orchestration layer. That orchestration layer is missing in this product. It will not discover all the applications, although they also have the catalog. They are constantly announcing their catalog to identify applications based on the service which we are discovering. 50% of the time, the application will discover automatically. However, for the other 50%, we need to find the application based on its running process. That's the automation method that we need to follow and that they call blueprint. We need to create those blueprints and then we need to tag those applications. That is the one process that takes time when we do the discovery. One of the cons of this product is that it will not discover all the applications running. It will not discover SAP or some kinds of applications that are running on those inside the application of the servers as well. When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera. We cannot scan the 1,000 servers together. That causes it to take time. There’s a graph missing. It shows where all the servers have interdependencies; however, when we do actual work, it will not work properly in terms of what we present to the customer.
Rami Jadallah - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamline management and integration with seamless upgrades
The primary reasons customers choose VxRail include ease of management, ease of upgrades, and integration with VMware. The hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies software and hardware upgrades. Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution has a good optimization feature."
"We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"I like Turbonomic's automation and AI machine learning features. It shows you what it can do, but it can also act on recommendations automatically. Integration with an APM system makes the AI/ML features truly effective. Understanding what the application is doing and the trends of application behavior can help you make real-world decisions and act on that information."
"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"My favorite part of the solution is the automation scheduling. Being able to choose when actions happen, and how they happen..."
"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"Provides multiple kinds of services for managing the clouds of multiple customers."
"The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources."
"For the customers I work with, it provides flexibility as far as storage is concerned, so it's security and access."
"When I started using CloudSphere, it wasn't mature, and it had multiple issues. For example, my team experienced server issues while using the solution, but recently, I noticed how much CloudSphere has improved. There used to be some latency issues with CloudSphere. It even gave error messages in the past when you select an option such as "the web server is not responding", but it has improved a lot, and now I don't get any errors from CloudSphere. What I like best about CloudSphere is that it has a lot of beneficial features, and it has a single pane for managing multi-cloud environments, which I find very helpful, and it's the main benefit you can get from CloudSphere."
"We do not need to install any appliances or any agents."
"We deploy VxRail systems to provide our customers with a distributed information solution. The customer was impressed because we delivered a serious data reduction. For example, we showed them that 10 terabytes on their traditional storage solution could be reduced to 1.5 terabytes in the VxRail systems. That's why the customers also like it so much,"
"The simplicity and manageability of VxRail are most valuable. We have a very good experience with this product. Its stability and scalability are also very good."
"The product is very stable, and I rate its stability as nine out of ten."
"Scalability is easy with VxRail, and I would rate it almost a ten out of ten."
"I have found the vSAN is highly flexible. The documentation is good and the interface of the solution is responsive and fast. The interface has everything you need to manage the solution, such as the VxRail and VMware integration. You can manage the hardware from within the VMware plasma pan."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"The initial setup is simple."
 

Cons

"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"The main issue I experienced from CloudSphere was recently resolved, but an area for improvement in the solution is that it lacks the functionality of migrating resources from one public cloud to another. If CloudSphere could provide that functionality, that would be very beneficial to users and companies."
"The next feature I would like to have full disclosure of what's being done with the data."
"When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera."
"There are quite a number of services that can't be deployed using CloudSphere."
"The solution must have a single management console for the resources and VMs."
"In the next release, maybe they could add in integration with the hyper-cloud so it will be easier to do the movement up and back to the cloud in order to scale in and scale out."
"We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable."
"The tool needs to improve its price."
"The support charges for VxRail should be optimized and made cheaper."
"The implementation of a VxRail, it's straightforward, but the ongoing utilization, and integration, are where it can start to become difficult if you're not used to doing it."
"VxRail could be easier to set up. It's tricky to configure the network properly and match the requirements."
"Troubleshooting can be a little more difficult than legacy systems."
"There could be better documentation and they should allow everyone to access the simulator."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."
"It depends on how that model will be used. It might be anywhere between $4 and $15 per license per month. It’s less expensive than other options."
"The product is very expensive."
"It is expensive as compared to other products in the same category."
"The product is expensive compared to other solutions."
"It is just as cheap to move over to an HCI solution as it is to maintain a legacy system."
"I do not believe that the price should be lower, as I feel it to be reasonable."
"It has a yearly subscription. It can be for one year, three years, or five years."
"Compare the VxRail product to Nutanix. Nutanix has more features, but its pricing is higher."
"The price would be in the middle to the expensive range. It is not cheap."
"While one could argue, from a strictly corporate standpoint, that the cost of VxRail has been in the higher range, the true evaluation lies in the return on investment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting...
What do you like most about CloudSphere?
The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources.
What is your primary use case for CloudSphere?
I use the solution for our hyper-converged infrastructure within the organization for hospital management. We also ac...
What advice do you have for others considering CloudSphere?
We have a FortiGate license. The product is very good. The technical support is also very good. If the solution provi...
How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...
What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?
VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not bein...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
HyperCloud
VCE VxRail
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Affymetrix, Bell Helicopter, Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, Porterville Unified School District, Interact for Health, VirtueCom, Warren Memorial Hospital, Front Porch, RMH Group, Meyers Nave, Intraworks, Information Technology, ETTE, Clackamas Community College
World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox
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