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IBM Turbonomic pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

4.4 out of 5

205 reviews
98% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

IBM Turbonomic provides automated data center management and optimizes cloud operations, leading to significant cost savings, notably in Azure. It automates VM sizing across ESXi hosts, delivers notifications on cluster utilization, and integrates AI for intelligent automation. Reports and monitoring need improvement, with limited integration for customized apps. The licensing model can raise costs, and upgrades are complex, requiring new setups. Despite this, it remains a strong tool for resource management.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM Turbonomic provides hands-off management for equalizing data center usage, improving efficiency and saving human resources.

The tool offers automated right-sizing of VMs and vMotion across ESXi hosts, significantly reducing performance bottlenecks and enabling better resource utilization.

Proactive monitoring and optimization of cloud operations with 40% savings are attributed to proper VM sizing, avoiding unnecessary expenditure.

IBM Turbonomic enhances application performance optimization and streamlines IT processes, reducing manual intervention and saving substantial time.

IBM Turbonomic's AI and machine learning features, along with predictive capabilities, offer effective decision-making and automation, improving infrastructure efficiency.

CONS

IBM Turbonomic's reporting lacks detailed graphical output suitable for executive presentations.

There is no straightforward upgrade path between major versions, leading to data loss.

The tool can be overly aggressive in resource management, sometimes reallocating resources incorrectly.

Integration with other monitoring software like AppDynamics is limited, affecting application monitoring.

The automation features pose risks with certain systems, such as Windows Server, causing potential instability.

IBM Turbonomic Pros review quotes

System Administrator at UL Workplace Health & Safety

Aug 24, 2017

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.

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Virtualization Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 16, 2017

It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently.

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Network Specialist II at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 20, 2017

The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts.

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Senior Systems and Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jun 23, 2017

With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past.

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Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 23, 2017

We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode.

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Works at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 27, 2017

The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs.

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Alliances Director, Data Center at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 18, 2018

The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications.

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DG

System Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Nov 8, 2020

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.

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TW

Principal Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 2, 2020

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.

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reviewer1464390

Server Administrator at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 2, 2020

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.

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IBM Turbonomic Cons review quotes

System Administrator at UL Workplace Health & Safety

Aug 24, 2017

The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like.

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Virtualization Specialist at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 16, 2017

The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool.

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Network Specialist II at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 20, 2017

While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training.

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Free Report: IBM Turbonomic Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM Turbonomic. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.

879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Senior Systems and Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jun 23, 2017

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.

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Sr. Infrastructure Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 23, 2017

I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon.

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Works at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 27, 2017

Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development.

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Alliances Director, Data Center at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

Jan 18, 2018

Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment.

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DG

System Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Nov 8, 2020

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.

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TW

Principal Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 2, 2020

There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me.

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reviewer1464390

Server Administrator at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 2, 2020

There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions.

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