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IBM Turbonomic vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

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 Virtualization Management Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Management (4th), IT Financial Management (3rd), IT Operations Analytics (9th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (3rd), AIOps (18th)
SolarWinds Virtualization M...
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 17.1%, up from 14.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is 8.7%, down from 9.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtualization Management Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic17.1%
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager8.7%
Other74.2%
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Dan Ambrose - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer 4 at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helps visibility, bridges the data gap, and frees up time
We use IBM Turbonomic in a hybrid cloud environment. Although it supports multi-cloud capabilities, we currently operate in a single-cloud setting. Turbonomic offers visibility into our environment's performance, spanning across applications, underlying infrastructure, and protection resources. The visibility and analytics help to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as applications and infrastructure. This is important for awareness collaboration, cost saving, and helping to design and improve our application. Enhanced visibility and data analytics have contributed to a significant reduction in our mean time to resolve. Tools like Turbonomic provide crucial visualization and insights, empowering us to make data-driven decisions instead of relying on assumptions as we did before. This newfound transparency translates to a massive improvement, going from complete darkness to having a clear 100 percent view of the situation. Although our applications are not optimized for the cloud we have seen some improvement in response time. IBM Turbonomic empowers us to achieve more with fewer people thanks to automation. Previously, customers frequently contacted us requesting resource increases to resolve issues. Now, we have a tool that allows us to objectively assess their needs, leading to a deeper understanding of our applications. This solution also generates significant cost savings in the cloud and optimizes hardware utilization within our data centers. Its AI algorithm intelligently allocates servers on hosts, maximizing efficiency without compromising performance. By fine-tuning resource allocation without causing performance bottlenecks, Turbonomic extends the lifespan of existing hardware, postponing the need for new purchases. This effectively stretches our capital expenditure budget. We started to see the benefits of IBM Turbonomic within the first 60 days. IBM is a fantastic partner. Their tech support has been outstanding, and the product itself is excellent - a very solid offering. By automating resource management with Turbonomic, our engineers are freed up to focus on more strategic initiatives like innovation and ongoing organizational projects. Previously, manually adding resources was a time-consuming process that interrupted workflows. Now, automation handles scaling efficiently, saving us thousands of man-hours and significant costs. It has illuminated the need for SetOps. It has highlighted areas of overspending, and the actions we've taken have demonstrated significant cost savings. IBM Turbonomic has positively impacted our overall application performance. IBM Turbonomic has helped reduce both CAPEX and OPEX. It has also significantly reduced cloud build times.
Ravi Khanchandani - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder Director at Techsa Services
Optimizing virtual environments by reclaiming and allocating resources efficiently
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization. It provides me with recommendations for resource allocation, indicating if a virtual machine is under-provisioned or over-provisioned. This allows me to reclaim resources, such as reducing the number of CPU cores or RAM, which is beneficial. Its capacity planning feature is also very useful for me. The GUI is highly simplified, cutting across various virtualization platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix environments.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Better than DRS to load balance VMs across hosts, allowing us to release 30% more computing resources."
"We really love Turbo and the time it saves us."
"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."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"Definitely try this if you have a huge virtual infrastructure, it has become a staple in our environment."
"It has allowed our IT organization to keep investments in hardware flat for a projected three year period, and we have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"Our ROI can be measured in the amount of server hardware that we have not had to purchase due to using VMTurbo Operations Manager."
"We no longer have to worry about cluster management, even in an environment with multiple hypervisor vendors."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."
"Virtualization manager’s cost analysis comparison report identified areas in which specific customers were being grossly undercharged for their resource consumption levels, as compared to rates available through AWS."
"Alerting expands, and makes, our monitoring and management much more efficient."
"This product is so helpful out-of-the-box."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."
"If you’re looking to get a lot more insight into your virtualization environment and more than just basic information, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is the choice you should make."
 

Cons

"The solution could be improved by having all interfaces together and I'd really like to see more interfaces."
"The only areas of improvement that I could think of at this moment in time is to just give it a fresh look, their new UI is currently in Beta but it looks very promising."
"Since Turbonomic can do so much, it can be a complex system to look at for one that haven’t laid eyes on it before."
"Certain versions have had glitches in the past but they've usually been fixed or patched within a matter of days."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"The user interface has room for improvement, but it is well on its way with the new UI that is being developed."
"Personally, I find the interface, especially for a new user, to be less than user friendly."
"Waiting for the HTML5 GUI since flash has refresh issues."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."
"Out of the box support for a wider array of hardware vendor/device-specific SNMP mibs could be improved upon."
"The UI is a little cumbersome at first, but the more you use it and get accustomed to it, the simpler it becomes."
"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"Adhoc reporting takes time to get used to – due mainly to the fact that the team I am on are all admins, and not necessarily accustomed to query reporting in the manner utilized by Solarwinds Virtualization Manager."
"I had some stability issues. I lost my environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"The product is fairly priced right now. Given its capabilities, it is excellently priced. We think that the product will become self-funding because we will be able to maximize our resources, which will help us from a capacity perspective. That should save us money in the long run."
"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."
"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business42
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
This solution delivers significant cost savings, especially from a capacity perspective. Consistent monitoring is essential in a virtualization environment, and Virtualization Manager, or VMAN as i...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems.
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
We predominantly work with financial organizations such as large banks, stock exchanges, and insurance companies, as well as IT-enabled services (ITES). I use SolarWinds Virtualization Manager at o...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
SolarWinds VMAN
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Elliot Health System
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,338 professionals have used our research since 2012.