IBM Turbonomic Reviews

We leverage Turbonomic for all of our planning activities. It provides us the tools we need to plan the scaling of our virtual desktop infrastructure.

In the past, we would try to manually capture resource utilization, and then use raw math to extrapolate growth requirements. With Turbonomic, we can scale a production (or proposed) use case based on normalized real data, and know exactly the horsepower it will need.

I think that our only limitation to date is that we have yet to tap in to its full potential.

18 months.

None.

None.

None.

Customer service around our user related "how to" questions has been outstanding.

Customer service around our user related "how to" questions has been outstanding.

N/a

Initial was straightforward and followed documentation cleanly.

In-house.

Compared to other competitors, Turbonomic is reasonable priced.

We attempted to leverage a built-in VMware solution, but it lacked depth.

VM automation to keep clusters' performance at its best.

Keeps clusters aligned, compute wise. We also use the planning and forecasting tools to determine needs.

Planning tools could be easier to use. Depending on your needs, it can be time consuming to get what you want.

A few years now.

No.

Every so often, and it usually needs a reboot to recover.

Not yet.

Customer success team is awesome. Sometimes the support team can take a long time to respond.

Good, but slow at times. If it's a really hot issue we can usually get a quick response though, after escalation.

Native VMware tools.

Easy.

In-house.

More of a cost avoidance for us, meaning that it saves us from over-provisioning and allows more density.

Yes.

The Turbonomics team is always looking for ways to improve their product. They are also willing to engage the customer success team to help us find new ways or easier ways to get more from the product. This is refreshing in a world where, after purchase, you are usually on your own after installing, other than support. That is not the case with this team.

Load balancing VMs across our cluster.

Automation of keeping resources balanced among the cluster.

NA.

Six years.

No.

Occasionally the server does not load balance properly and needs to be restarted.

No.

10.

10.

No.

No.

In-house.

NA

Licensing cost is relatively cost effective.

No.

The reporting and planning features are used a lot and contribute to our ROI. But we have only touched the tip of the iceberg with the product, currently utilizing the recommendation function to get more comfortable before moving to automation of manual processes.

In the past, used multiple products to monitor CPU, memory utilization, or find virtual machine using large snapshots on datastores. We can look in one place throughout the day or get daily reports alerting us at the start of the day.

Built-in, context-sensitive Help would be useful. Much more intuitive personal dashboard designing would be nice.

One year at present company and three-plus years at previous company.

No, or it was already in place.

Product has proven to be pretty stable.

Ran into a snafu with a database during an upgrade, support was knowledgeable and on top of the issue quickly and resolved it as quickly.

Always helpful.

Nothing but good things to say about tech support, always quick to respond back and I always feel like I got the A-team working with me on my issue.

Manually monitoring and manipulating resources, and grabbing reports from multiple sources. Switching made it easy to do all of the above.

Pretty straightforward.

In house.

For me the ROI is measured in the amount of time I save not searching around for information. Being able to produce reports to show customers why they don't need as much resources as they think, money saved.

Talk to your sales rep.

We have fully automated resource scheduling with our VMware clusters. We have taken recommendations on sizing that have saved hundred of gigabytes of RAM throughout our clusters.

Without having to worry about a host becoming over-utilized, we have been able to work on more important projects. We are able to be more efficient with our host resources, saving the business money.

A more robust reporting engine would be a huge boon to us. A bit better error messaging with Application Control Module would help during troubleshooting adding a new target.

We've been a Turbo customer since 2014.

No, and their support was very quick and helpful to assist with major upgrades. In the end, it was easy enough that with a little Linux knowledge and the Turbo documentation, even major upgrades could be performed without having to contact support.

Turbo is very powerful, and does exactly what you tell it to do. If you configure it to be too aggressive to either efficiency or performance, your cluster might become unbalanced. We have had great stability keeping it slightly skewed towards efficiency vs performance.

No, we have one Turbo instance controlling multiple datacenters.

10/10 on customer support, as well as account management, could not be happier.

10/10 on technical support. If I encounter a complex issue, they escalate me to a developer resource who dives deeply to find a root cause.

VMware's DRS didn't seem to balance our clusters very evenly. vROps made sizing recommendations that were just not correct. We tested Turbo and the recommendations were all on point and we are able to trust them.

Very easy setup. OVA template, adding vCenters, making some groups, allowing our firewalls to let Turbo access everything and we were set.

In-house team was easily able to install.

We've saved an entire ESXi host worth of RAM with Turbo.

This product is very competitively priced for all the automation it brings.

We actually purchased vROps but it wasn't enough.

We really love Turbo and the time it saves us.

The automation, of course.

This toolkit has some hooks that allows us to upsize VMs on the fly based on the user's current utilization.

Decrease the cost.

Three years.

Needed to upsize the DB shortly after deployment. Also, configuring for a highly secure environment required a lot of file tweaks in the Linux subsystem.

No.

No.

Excellent. They've always been quick to support any issues/queries we have.

Excellent.

DRS - Built-in tool didn't provide adequate migrations and no reporting about overall health.

Complex - highly secured environment. Had to change many of the system configs to make it more secure.

We implemented this ourselves.

Not tracked.

No.

The load balancing is the most valuable feature of the product. Turbonomic balances on more metrics than vROps and has helped us utilizing our hosts in a better way. We are also using the API heavily for querying performance data.

Turbonomic has, to an extent, helped us grow our VM environment without us having to buy new hardware. We are also using the performance statistics gathered by Turbonomic in our operations dashboards to give us control over the environment.

Looking forward to the new HTML 5 UI.

One and a half years.

The deployment is very easy. You need to invest some time in adjusting the thresholds to suit your hardware and environment.

Some of the previous versions have had some issues with the stability, but the latest versions, >=5.7, seems to have fixed this.

We have 4000+ VMs in our environment and 120+ Hosts. No issues so far with the scalability.

Good customer service. Not too "pushy" on additional features, and always trying to understand our needs and to see if there are areas where we could use the product in a better way.

Great technical support. Fast response and very knowledgable.

Have used vROps for a little while. Much more complex and didn't give us the same value.

The automation of balancing VMware cluster workloads. This feature insures that my VMware clusters are always running in an optimal state. The streamlined automation is what sold me on this product.

I like the reporting system along with the ability to export reports to PDF format.

HTML 5.

Six years.

None.

I did have a few issues but support quickly resolved the issue.

None.

Top-rated.

Top-rated.

None.

Straightforward and easy to setup.

In-house

This software enabled me to avoid buying more servers until I really need to buy more.

None.

Yes, VMware Operations Manager which was really more expensive with no automation, and their reporting is not what I wanted.

Great product!!

• Automatic placement of workload in multi-node VMware cluster.
• Recommend/perform memory and vCPU configuration to match work load.

Everyone's sizing guess is wrong.

Turbonomics resolves the issue with continuous workload placement and sizing recommendations/actions.

Licensing for clusters with few VMs (i.e. HA focus over consolidation focus).

One year.

No, the integration was cake.

No. Very stable.

No. We use if for seven hosts at two sites.

Excellent. We were able to evaluate and implement with full support.

High.

No. We just guessed and tried to use PerfMon and VMware performance and user feelings to size and place the workload. Bad.

Just install and hook into vCenter and then understand what it is saying.

We did initially work with pinning workloads between types of VMs but now let all swim in the same pool with a Turbonomic lifeguard.

In-house with input from application vendor.

Continuous as the workload placement is automatic as things change.

There was no other solution that actually allowed the execution of its recommendations.

The sophistication of the algorithm is sufficient to not cause imbalance by the execution of balancing. Totally sweet.

It is most applicable with clusters that host large numbers of VMs.

VMware vRealize Operations was reviewed but did not sufficiently automate the process and did not seem to be as sophisticated in its analysis.

This has been a set-it-and-forget-it solution that does a great job but is behind the scenes.

Originally we looked at Turbonomic as a replacement for our existing virtual management tool as it offered us a real-time view of our environment, which is something we never had before. But 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.

The VM rightsizing tools and the intelligent placing of workloads have helped us to not only streamline what we have but, in conjunction with the sizing tools, has allowed us to look at future scenarios and potentially reduce our spend on physical kit in the DC.

The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool. Subsequent releases have had the option of an updated UI which is not only much cleaner in its look but is also much more intuitive in its operation.

We have been a customer for over two and a half years now.

None, deployment was extremely quick and simple, well within the time quoted on the documentation.

None, we have rarely rebooted or had to spend any time on the appliances or the tool. Apart from upgrades, it's been running constantly since the initial install.

No, but our environment has been pretty stable for the past 18 months.

Very good, the issues we have had were dealt with in a timely fashion.

Very good. Feedback and support were both very good.

We used another tool to give us insights into our VM environment but due to the way it gathered data it was always at least 24 hours out of date. Turbonomic gave us the ability to look at near real-time data coming directly from out VMware environment.

Initial setup was very straightforward with very simple steps to follow.

All implementation was done in-house with no initial input from Turbonomic.

The tool has demonstrated that considerable savings could be had by reducing the amount of physical hardware and, therefore, licenses that are needed.

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.

We looked at numerous solutions including SCOM, Veeam, and custom solutions.

The ability to connect to many different environments along with the integration with partner systems make this an essential tool in our IS VM management strategy.