IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
204
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st)
VMware Aria Automation
Ranking in Cloud Management
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (15th), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.3%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Automation is 13.1%, up from 12.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
Unique Categories:
Cloud Migration
2.9%
Virtualization Management Tools
14.6%
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
0.6%
Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)
31.3%
 

Featured Reviews

MO
Jan 19, 2024
Excels in providing stability, efficient resource optimization, and cost savings at the infrastructure layer, with minimal maintenance requirements
It offers visibility and analytics for monitoring performance across our environment, starting from the application layer and extending down the stack to the underlying infrastructure resources. Specifically, it concentrates on optimizing memory and CPU resources as part of our focus on hardware and environment optimization, without delving into additional aspects. There was a single project where it helped us reduce the size of hundreds of VMs. This represents the only example with which I am familiar. It's important to note that optimizing the monitoring of our private cloud is not the primary function of this tool. It is specifically utilized for optimization purposes. We employ it for tasks such as trending predictions and VM utilization performance. However, for monitoring, we rely on a completely different tool. It has resulted in cost savings, specifically at the infrastructure layer.
Lekan Ogunwale - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 13, 2024
Ability to exectute tasks quickly but the process to automate is predominantly manual
Currently, our usage of VMware Aria Automation is relatively light, mainly focused on automating VMs. However, we aim to broaden our use cases to include more complex scenarios, such as integrating with ServiceNow for end-to-end automation from request to execution. Our goal is to transition…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode."
"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."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"The proactive monitoring of all our open enrollment applications has improved our organization. We have used it to size applications that we are moving to the cloud. Therefore, when we move them out there, we have them appropriately sized. We use it for reporting to current application owners, showing them where they are wasting money. There are easy things to find for an application, e.g., they decommissioned the server, but they never took care of the storage. Without a tool like this, that storage would just sit there forever, with us getting billed for it."
"The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"Before implementing Turbonomic, we had difficulty reaching a consensus about VM placement and sizing. Everybody's opinion was wrong, including mine. The application developers, implementers, and infrastructure team could never decide the appropriate size of a virtual machine. I always made the machines small, and they always made them too big. We were both probably wrong."
"Our QA department is able to spin up a new instance of Windows virtual machine and test whatever use case they have, then turn it back down whenever they are done."
"The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."
"usability; Ease of use, the GUI, is probably the best feature, so that really anybody can use it. You don't have to be technical to be able to deploy a VM. I find it to be intuitive and user-friendly. Regarding some of the files that you feed it, you don't have to do a ton of development. You can feed it pretty standard configuration files. You don't have to be a developer, you don't have to know C# or Java or the like to get it going."
"Using the VMware vRealize self-service portal, we can better manage the lifecycle."
"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."
"The benefits are that it gives you a heads-up display and dashboard of the way everything's running. The ability to automate around those tasks is really where we get the value."
"vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems."
"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."
 

Cons

"Turbonomic can modernize the look and feel, making it more user-friendly to access and obtain information."
"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."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"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."
"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."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines."
"The basic support is not there for Google Cloud and Azure. They are unable to provision nor do cost controls. Google is still left out. It is great that they have done AWS, but we are a retailer which means nothing to us because it is a competitor. Azure is good, but Google is where a lot of our development environments are."
"I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."
"It has some limitations for scalability, especially for remote data center management. For some components, everything need to be centralized."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"I think they could probably do more if they created more actions and more use cases to automate things."
"They can improve on the dashboard representations and the options for non-technical people. I would like to see the ability to customize that and maybe provide them with helpful guides to what subscriptions they have. Sometimes, I find that I have to do more explanation to people who do approvals. I would really like to customize the display to the terms they use in their particular business unit. So a little bit more of a nod to the customization of the UI for non-technical users would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I consider the pricing to be high."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you... But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"The pricing and licensing are fair. We purchase based on benchmark pricing, which we have been able to get. There are no surprise charges nor hidden fees."
"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."
"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."
"The tool is expensive since it is an enterprise product."
"Better pricing is always handy, but I feel it's at the right price point."
"It made the provisioning of the virtual machines easier and faster. We can react more quickly to customers' demands."
"As far as value is concerned, it has been essential to our environment. We have been able to deploy VMs quickly and the developers have their own sandbox, so they can spin up and destroy VMs at their own will."
"This is an expensive product and the high price is starting to become an issue for us."
"We have seen significant ROI. We used to have physical servers, it took 90 days to get a server, order it, buy it, and get it in. We have it down to 10 minutes, building a server with virtualization, and now that's too slow. So, we let the customer do it at their speed. Therefore, it is pretty much up in a couple of minutes and they have a server."
"We do plan to see ROI with any new implementation of new technologies being implemented within our environment."
"I'm very interested in the integration with Puppet. However, my organization doesn't have the funding for something like Puppet right now. If VMware would integrate that feature set (Puppet) into vRA. That would be very awesome."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
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.
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
I would like Turbonomic to add more services, especially in the cloud area. I have already told them this. They can add Azure NetApp Files. They can add Azure Blob storage. They have already added ...
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs and their solution.
What's the difference between VMware vRA (automation) and vROps (operations)?
vROP is a virtualization management solution from VMWare. It is efficient and easy to manage. You can find anything you need from the software interface. It provides complete visibility over applic...
Is there any way to try VMware Aria Automation for free?
When it comes to VMware Aria Automation, you have three choices for free runs: Hands-on Lab (HOL) Advanced lab A free trial I cannot describe in detail the second and third options as my company ...
Which sectors can benefit the most from VMware Aria Automation?
I was looking at VMware Aria Automation case studies recently and I got the impression that three main kinds of companies were using it most often: Social organizations Financial institutions and ...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
VMware vRealize Automation, vRA, VMware DynamicOps Cloud Suite
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Rent-a-Center, Amway, Vistra Energy, Liberty Mutual
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. VMware Aria Automation and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.