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IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Aria Suite comparison

 

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
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (3rd), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (10th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (2nd), AIOps (17th)
VMware Aria Suite
Average Rating
9.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1446966 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
it_user224100 - PeerSpot reviewer
SSIO Infrastructure Engineer at Wyndham Destination Network - RCI Europe
Key benefits include the ability to identify resource usage and hot spots.
I have been using Operations Manager for the last few months since reviewing my licence structure and procuring the Enterprise Plus, management bundle. Having a number of distributed vSphere environments spread across the UK and Europe has presented a number of challenges in terms of centralised alerting and reporting. With my collections all configured I am now able to receive invaluable information quickly - reducing the labour that was previously causing issues. Key benefits:- * Ability to identify resource usage and hot spots * Understand where I can reclaim resources * Trend and forecast my virtual landscape by adding projects

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have saved money on licensing and availability of our applications."
"I find their economics-based algorithms fascinating."
"It helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending."
"The auto resource leveling on my hyper-v cluster saves my staff so much time on monitoring and performance tuning."
"Right-sizing and right-balancing VMs and hosts used to be an ongoing, tedious, and time consuming effort. With Turbonomic, it does that work for me so I can focus my attention on other priorities."
"Customer Service: This is one of the areas that Turbonomic shines."
"We have been able to use the planning feature to consolidate VMs on few hosts and have been able to show savings of several hundred thousands."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"Thanks guys – you managed to turn around an extremely frustrating experience into something more positive."
"I found the ease of use with Operations Manager Dashboard and providing complete visibility of your infrastructure most valuable."
"With my collections all configured I am now able to receive invaluable information quickly, reducing the labour that was previously causing issues."
"This is our lifeblood, our ability to be pro-active instead of retroactive, and without it, it hurts our bottom line."
 

Cons

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"Turbonomic's current UI is coded in Flash though they have stated an HTML5 version is coming soon."
"UI can be clunky at times, they have a new UI just not fully released."
"Would like some better canned reports allowing for average utilization of VMs in the environment during a defined range of hours."
"I'd like to see an improvement in the reporting, from including more canned reports, to being able to more easily customize the existing ones (without needing to write SQL queries)."
"Turbonomic is not easy to use out of the box."
"The user interface is quite dated."
"I would like to see the vrealize Suite support the Mcrosoft Azure"
"I would like the reporting function to be made more complete."
"It has color coding to an extent, but it needs more colors to tag more diversely."
"It’s hardly the most streamlined deployment experience is it? It’s ironic that an application designed to orchestrate operations can’t orchestrate its installation a bit better!"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise147
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise3
 

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 set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The ...
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. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single d...
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Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
vRealize suite
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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