IBM Turbonomic vs OpenNebula comparison

Read 15 OpenNebula reviews

3,630 Views
3,376 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Turbonomic

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 17, 2024

IBM Turbonomic and OpenNebula compete in the cloud management and optimization software category. IBM Turbonomic seems to have the upper hand due to its strong automation and optimization features.

Features: IBM Turbonomic is notable for its automation and optimization capabilities, particularly in capacity management, forecasting, and real-time resource allocation. OpenNebula is recognized for its user-friendly interface, deployment flexibility, and a robust API that supports customization.

Room for Improvement: IBM Turbonomic could benefit from a more intuitive interface and enhanced reporting features. Users of OpenNebula express a need for better-organized documentation, advanced cloud features, and improved template management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Turbonomic supports both on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, with high customer service ratings. OpenNebula offers flexibility for private and public cloud deployments and provides excellent community support.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Turbonomic is cost-effective, often yielding significant operational savings. OpenNebula's open-source model offers substantial cost benefits, especially for small to medium-scale environments.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Turbonomic vs. OpenNebula Report (Updated: September 2026).

IBM Turbonomic vs. OpenNebula

Download the complete report

Helped 915,287 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in Cloud Management

4th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

205

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (3rd), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (8th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), AIOps (17th)

OpenNebula

Ranking in Cloud Management

26th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 4.7%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenNebula is 1.5%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic	4.7%
OpenNebula	1.5%
Other	93.8%

Cloud Management

Featured Reviews

reviewer1446966

Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them

The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

Read full review

FOURES Jean-Philippe

Products Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Reliable, simple to manage, and offers great technical support

The support of VXLAN fits with our network management. Thanks to this we can propose mixed solutions using virtual resources on OpenNebula and bare metal servers hosted in our facilities linked to each other on the sale network. This use case is very useful when some applications need bare metal power (Kubernetes workers, huge databases, AI models computations, et cetera). The cluster management is very useful for splitting our different clusters (mutual vs dedicated). We can manage deployments and capacity planning without pain. The API is also really simple and it helped us to develop the Terraform provider to manage OpenNebula like any other cloud infrastructure.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Turbonomic is fantastic at scalability! It has great built in tools to plan scaling."

"Customer Service: Very good. Very quick response times. Technical Support: Very good. Knowledgeable staff."

"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."

"Less downtime due to small issues becoming big because we didn't see them, and the VMs are running at their optimal performance."

"Turbonomics ability to present suggested improvements, and enact those changes upon approval, have been very helpful in our environment."

"The top level view of my overall infrastructure's health has been a great tool."

"On-premises, one advantage I find particularly appealing is the ability to create policies for automatic CPU and memory scaling based on demand."

"Provides a level of automation beyond VMware provided DRS."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"OpenNebula freed my customer from doing the maintenance operations of the servers because now that can be done by his clients."

"I also like the ability to build custom functions. I can define a function where I have two types of views and configure the dependencies. The virtual data centers concept allows me to define users. If a user wants to join certain kinds of machines, the host and the other user won't see them. It gives me the flexibility to define multiple views and data centers in one place."

"For our use case, we found the solution to be the best fit when dealing with infrastructure services."

"The solution provides templates for configurations that can easily be exchanged to VMs."

"What's best about OpenNebula that people like is that it's easy to deploy. It's also easy to manage. It's interesting because people choose OpenNebula over other solutions because of the ease of management."

"For the entire data center, as a private cloud, I believe that user management, expert management, and the virtual data center is completely magic for the users."

"I'll definitely recommend OpenNebula because it's an open-source solution that's effortless to set up, and the total cost of ownership is low."

"The service feature appeals most to us, thus it is the most valuable."

More OpenNebula pros

Cons

"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."

"Training was a bit disjointed at first, but the second session was improved."

"Also reporting needs to be worked on, the lack of ability to edit a report has been a challenge."

"Had issues trying to get Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V hosts attached to Turbonomic. This required more effort as there are some changes to be made on WMI configurations."

"However, the current versions do not split out headroom by component nor do they indicate where the capacity bottleneck lies (e.g. CPU, memory, or storage)."

"The user interface is quite dated."

"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed."

"I have had some issues from time to time with DB table errors, though not sure if it is a product issue or the storage I am on."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"I would like to see OpenNebula add more integration with REST API. XML-RPC API is good, but it becomes a pain to form a resting output."

"The front-facing API can be improved to support lots of requests when the platform is huge with lots of virtual resources."

"As with all enterprise software licensing, the pricing is not intuitive and must be negotiated; grandfathered contracts are better than anything offered today."

"Template management also needs improvement in OpenNebula because it's inferior right now."

"There are no payment gateways in OpenNebula."

"The web interface could be better. It's not very difficult to use, but there's room for enhancement."

"Hosting platforms are limited so the deployment process needs improvement."

"They have been saying for the past two and a half years that they would develop a feature to hot-add RAM and CPU, but it does not work."

More OpenNebula cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year."

"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."

"In the last year, Turbonomic has reduced our cloud costs by $94,000."

"We see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective."

"We felt the pricing was very fair for the product. It is in no way prohibitive for larger deployments, unlike other similar product on the market."

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"VRA is very expensive but OpenNebula is free."

"We use the Community Edition, rather than the Enterprise Edition."

"OpenNebula gives good value for money."

"OpenNebuoa has recently come up with a new subscription model that is economical and a lot of new customers are choosing this as it is an easy subscription model."

"The solution is open source so is free."

"The licensing for OpenNebula used to be free, but now it's no longer free. A customer contacted me asking to move to another provider because of the changes in the licensing terms for OpenNebula. I have no information on how much the OpenNebula license is because the customer pays for it, and I only do the integration."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	42
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	147

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	3

Comparisons

Densify vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 5% of the time

VMware Aria Operations vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 4% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 3% of the time

VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 2% of the time

IBM Kubecost vs IBM Turbonomic

Compared 2% of the time

More IBM Turbonomic Competitors

CloudStack vs OpenNebula

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Aria Automation vs OpenNebula

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs OpenNebula

Compared 5% of the time

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs OpenNebula

Compared 5% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs OpenNebula

Compared 3% of the time

More OpenNebula Competitors

Product Reports

IBM Turbonomic

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Download OpenNebula product report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

No data available

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

Overview

IBM Turbonomic enhances IT efficiency with automation, capacity planning, and reporting features, enabling organizations to optimize resource utilization and improve performance through advanced workload management and scenario analysis.

IBM Turbonomic equips organizations with robust capabilities for dynamic resource allocation and informed decision-making. Its planning module provides scenario analysis, right-sizing recommendations, and a customizable dashboard for tailored insights. Automation features improve workload placements and resource efficiency, while forecasting capabilities enhance performance. Simulation of environments helps in decision-making, leading to significant savings in cloud and hardware management. There is a need for a more intuitive interface, enhanced navigation, and improved customization in reporting with integration potential with third-party applications. Transition to the HTML5 interface and stronger training resources are among anticipated improvements.

What are the key features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automation: Automates workload placement and dynamic resource allocation to boost efficiency.
Capacity Planning: Provides scenario analysis and right-sizing for optimal resource use.
Customizable Dashboard: Offers tailored insights for organization needs.
Forecasting: Enhances decision-making through resource-use predictions.
Simulation Capabilities: Aids in assessing savings and performance gains.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Cost Optimization: Reduces spending on cloud and hardware resources.
Enhanced Performance: Promotes consistent application performance and resource efficiency.
Improved Decision-Making: Supports informed choices with scenario simulation.
Flexibility and Scalability: Assists with workload migrations and resource management across environments.

IBMTurbonomic is implemented across industries such as cloud management and virtualization, helping organizations balance clusters, optimize virtual machine performance, and manage Azure configurations. In resource-monitored environments like VMware and XenServer, its features facilitate load balancing, VM rightsizing, and automation shutoffs. Industries can rely on its insights for cost-saving measures, ensuring efficient resource allocation for hybrid and cloud environments.

IBM

OpenNebula offers scalability, ease of deployment, and integration capabilities that enhance cloud management for enterprises. It supports both virtual and bare metal resources, providing a versatile cloud management experience.

OpenNebula provides a robust platform for building, managing, and automating private and public clouds. Its compatibility with platforms like VMware, KVM, and containers makes it ideal for businesses hosting virtual private clouds and deploying Kubernetes clusters. OpenNebula's API and SDK facilitate automation and integration, allowing organizations to connect with IT systems effectively. Despite its strengths, improvements in object storage, REST API integration, and UI enhancements are needed. The documentation can be disorganized, and users encounter challenges with upgrades and community support.

What are key OpenNebula features?

Scalability: Easily manage resources for growing cloud environments.
User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies cloud management tasks.
Integration: Connects seamlessly with IT systems using robust API and SDK.
Hypervisor Support: Works with multiple hypervisors and container platforms.

What benefits do users find in OpenNebula?

Efficiency: Streamlines cloud operations, reducing management complexities.
Versatility: Offers support for both virtual and bare metal resources.
Community and Documentation: Though needing improvement, provides valuable resources for users.
Cost-Effectiveness: Lightweight nature minimizes resource expenditure.

OpenNebula implementation spans industries where cloud automation and management are critical. Companies utilize OpenNebula for deploying private clouds and managing infrastructure. Its support for Kubernetes clusters is beneficial in tech-driven sectors, highlighting OpenNebula's adaptability to different operational needs.

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Akamai, BBC, Fermilab, Terradue, Surf Sara, Produban, Netways, ESA, China Mobile, BlackBerry, Deloitte, Fuze, Telefonica, Trivago, Nokia, Encore Tech, Beeks.

IBM Turbonomic vs. OpenNebula