IBM Turbonomic vs VMware vSphere comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
204
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st)
VMware vSphere
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
448
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 14.6%, down from 17.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSphere is 17.7%, down from 27.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtualization Management Tools
Unique Categories:
Cloud Migration
2.9%
Cloud Management
6.3%
Server Virtualization Software
19.6%
 

Featured Reviews

DT
Jan 31, 2024
Helps to optimize costs and automate on-prem changes
Rightsizing and right categorization are part of optimization exercises. Turbonomic provides a single platform to help optimize costs and resource efficiency. It provides good visibility of performance at the resource level. This visibility and analytics have helped bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams such as Applications and Infrastructure. The visibility and analytics from Turbonomic have not helped reduce our mean time to resolution. We only used it for cost savings and not optimization. Turbonomic has not impacted our application performance. You can do it if you integrate it with a tool like Dynatrace but not in itself. Turbonomic can optimize the monitoring of public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and/or Kubernetes. That is where it specializes. With respect to the cloud, their algorithm is pretty good, and their recommendations are relatively trustworthy as compared to other tools. For cloud optimization, it is pretty good. It is also pretty good for balancing on-prem resources. On the on-prem side, we had some automation or scheduling in place. On the cloud side, we did not do any scheduling. On the on-prem side, it would automatically go and make the changes needed, but on the cloud side, we took the recommendations, and we made the changes ourselves. We did not schedule them in the cloud. It is hard to quantify the time saved, but the analysis part is pretty good. We must have saved time and money. Turbonomic helped to optimize costs and automate the changes on-prem. There were savings, but I do not have an exact number because we did it in phases. The first time, there would be more savings, and from the second round, they would slow down because you already reaped the benefit from the first-time recommendations. We did not do all the changes at once, so I do not have the numbers, but typically, any organization would have 20% savings in VMs and disks. Turbonomic does a good job. It depends on how big an organization is, but on average, the tool can cut down the VM cost by 20%.
Youssef_Hmani - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 8, 2023
A robust virtualization platform renowned for its comprehensive features, high stability and strong support
We use it exclusively for internal purposes within our company, managing our office infrastructure as a private cloud solution It stands out as a comprehensive and advantageous solution, providing a full package that effectively caters to our needs for managing our private cloud. The most…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are the cluster utilization reports and the resource capacity planning. We can simulate how much capacity we can add to the current resources. The individual DM reports and VM-facing recommendations report are also helpful."
"The solution has a good optimization feature."
"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."
"The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps."
"The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well."
"The most valuable features are the virtualization and the performance on the virtualization platform."
"Most valuable features are quick provisioning, High Availability, and DRS for balancing workload."
"It's easy to use and very user-friendly."
"We have the possibility to move workloads to different locations."
"Stable and secure management console for virtual environments, with a diligent technical support team."
"Since it is riding inside of a multi-hardware environment, downtime is virtually nothing."
"The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton."
"Cross vendor integration is in my opinion one of the best features."
 

Cons

"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."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"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 do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"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."
"After running this solution in production for a year, we may want a more granular approach to how we utilize the product because we are planning to use some of its metrics to feed into our financial system."
"In the past, little changes have broken things in vSphere. Going from 6.0, which worked perfectly fine on the Mac Pro, there were certain changes in hardware drivers, when 6.5 came out. Some were no longer present or had been deprecated. As a result, it didn't work on the Mac Pro anymore, which was business critical."
"It would be good if the licensing cost of the solution could be cheaper."
"The implementation of VMware vSphere is easy. For integration companies, it's easy, the final client cannot do it alone but for an implementor it's easy."
"The improvement is more from a licensing perspective rather than from a feature functionality perspective. There could be more flexibility and fewer model options to make it easier to sell. Today, there are so many different options available, and sometimes, it is not really clear which one is the right version or the right model to propose."
"I can't speak to any missing features. It has everything I need."
"When it comes to cross-regional (e.g., someone in the US managing the China vSphere implementations), it can be a somewhat slow. I would recommend increasing the speed. While there has already been improvement there, I would like to see more."
"When we talk about the overall private cloud stack, I would prefer for it be a lot more seamless."
"Its price can be better. It is very expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"Its price is slightly higher for India. It is a little bit expensive on a monthly basis when considering the value of the Indian rupee."
"In today's market, agility is the new currency. Without virtualization, and vSphere in particular, we wouldn't have the level of agility in the business that we have today."
"It is cost effective."
"Once you pay for the standard license, that's it unless you want another feature to be activated. That's a different thing."
"It could be cheaper."
"Flexible pricing would be nice. Some of the pricing models are fairly big."
"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."
"vSphere is expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user234735 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 10, 2015
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Educational Organization
28%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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 is IOMMU?
DEEPEN DHULLA did explain well IOMMU. IOMMU has to be activated at the bios level. It exists on Intel and AMD platforms. It is used a lot inside virtualization platforms like VMware VSphere. It pr...
Why KVM??? Help please!
We use VMware and KVM. We find that KVM is a lot simpler to use and it provides the virtualization we need for Linux and Windows. For us, VMware does not offer any advantage. Moreover, KVM is free.
What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
No data available
 

Learn More

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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Abu Dhabi Ports Company, ACS, AIA New Zealand, Consona, Corporate Express, CS Energy, and Digiweb.
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, IBM, Nutanix and others in Virtualization Management Tools. Updated: June 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.