IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Provides automation of cluster resource management.

This has saved us a great deal of expenses by better balancing workloads across ESXi hosts. This allowed for higher VM densities.

Reports: Have a wider variety of canned reports ready to go.

We have been using this for three years.

We had a couple of minor version bugs, but support was excellent and quick to address these.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer service is excellent and very proactive.

Technical support is excellent and very proactive.

The setup was straightforward and quick.

The implementation was done in-house with assistance from Turbonomic's engineers.

We achieved an ROI in less than three months.

The pricing was very reasonable.

We considered VMware Operations Manager.

It is an excellent product backed by a fantastic team of technical and customer service staff.

• Single pane utilization, reporting on UCS, 3PAR, and VMware
• Capacity planning
• Placement recommendations

Turbonomic's largest impact is that I no longer have to manually monitor VM/host performance across vCenter's and clusters. This has been replaced with a single dashboard, which highlights recommended actions and reasons.

We have been using this solution since 2014.

I had one upgrade fail. I called support and it appeared to be a one-off problem. They had it fixed within 24 hours. This has been my one and only support call since deploying the application.

I never had issues with stability. It just works!

I'm monitoring 6 UCS Domains, 5 vCenter servers, 23 ESXi clusters spanning 115 hosts, and over 900 VMs in six countries. This little appliance has no issues.

I've had very pleasant experiences with customer service. Everyone with whom I have spoken has been prompt and knowledgeable.

I've only had one support call and it was a great. Comparing Turbonomic Support against HPE, VMware, and Cisco, is like comparing heaven and hell.

We evaluated SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. It was chaotic and took too much effort to truly see what was going on within the environment.

I think my six year old son could deploy it.

The implementation was done in-house.

I have never measured the ROI, but I would expect it to be massive since problem resolutions have decreased significantly.

Negotiate and analyze how you want to use the product (automate/analyze/both) and which systems you report against. You don't need to monitor all of your systems. I have a lot of small, remote locations that have two hosts and under 10 VMs, and it is not worth spending money for those sites. Let VMWare HA/DRS handle it, because you are probably not going to run into performance or scalability issues.

We evaluated vROps and SolarWinds Virtual Manager.

Do a 30-day demo and actually use the product. You will quickly see how good or bad of a VMware admin you are.

If you use 3PAR, EMC, NetApp, and/or UCS, this will be invaluable to you, especially if you have junior staff.

It is a great way to give them visibility into those environments without granting them access.

We have benefited from both the workload placement and analysis of our hosts via running plans. Soon we will embark on rightsizing. This tool offers us the best mechanism we have had so far to implement this effort.

Our clusters are more balanced now than relying on DRS to manage workloads. Also, with the plan data, we are able to have actual data behind what our clusters look like now, how to best optimize them, and if we can afford to remove hosts. This will help us run an efficient, high performing environment while also limiting out licensing costs.

Have plan data shared across user accounts within Turbonomic. Also more granular permissions. We would benefit greatly from more flexibility than the current roles available. Finally, reduce the time to have the efficiency data repopulate into the GUI.

Less than one year.

No.

No.

No.

9/10. I have received prompt and quality service.

9/10. I have received prompt and quality service.

Initial setup was with the "appliance" package but we decided to migrate to a RHEL server. Both the setup and migration were documented well and easy to follow.

Our initial build was done in-house and was followed up with a training session. The trainer was knowledgeable, but we have received a higher level tech advice, as we moved forward, from other resources at Turbonomic.

No

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.