IBM Turbonomic Reviews

The automation makes my life easier because I know my VMware clusters are balanced across all my hosts.

Performance issues have decreased since there's no longer bottlenecks on certain ESXi hosts.

The GUI has been updated since I first started using Turbonomics which was a welcomed improvement. Initially the GUI was difficult to follow and find where things are. It's gotten better but the GUI could still use some work to make certain functions more obvious.

Approximately a year now.

Deployment was quite easy, learning the product took some time but my sales contact took the initiative and scheduled a 45 minute webex to go over the product with me and my team. Some team members couldn't be present at the original time so my sales contact scheduled a second webex for them.

Once the product was up and running the hardest part was handing over the reigns to it. I implemented some custom rules for certain trouble VMs in my environment and, after some time, finally allowed the product to go fully automated and never looked back since.

I haven't had a need to increase or decrease the amount of hosts i'm monitoring. From the GUI i'm able to find the top 10 worst offending VMs for resource utilization or what have you fairly easily. I'm monitoring 15 or so ESXi hosts with nearly 1000 VMs, I haven't had any issues with the product not able to handle my scale.

Customer service has been exceptional, I get quartly updates via the phone and they remember me. I get too busy to remember to upgrade occasionally so my sales contact is good at reminding me without nagging :)

I haven't had a need to contact their technical support since the product is fairly simple to figure out.

I used to monitor my vm performance from the VMware thick client but there were too many places to look to find what I needed to identify an issue. I deployed a few products to test out and settled with Turbonomics since their interface had the most information available on one page for what I was looking for as well as the ability to create customized reports for daily monitoring.

Really straightforward, just deploy an OVF template to your VMware environment. Configure a service account and setup permissions within VMware so the account can access what you want it to and stop it from accessing hosts you don't want to monitor.

I implemented the solution myself, I did receive help from my sales contact via WebExs for some things I wasn't sure about.

I don't have any way to discern a monetary figure on the benefits for using Turbonomic... I would say if anything it offers me the ability to offload monitoring of my virtual environment and focus more on other things. It's freed up a great deal of time I've spent in the past troubleshooting performance issues and manually verifying that VMware was balanced correctly.

Only license what you want to monitor, this product will monitor everything connected to your vCenter unless you restrict the access of the service account. having the restrictions in place ahead of deployment can make for a much easier time dealing with the licenses. Pricing-wise this wasn't the cheapest but it also wasn't the most expensive. I was more looking for something to fit my needs than something affordable so price wasn't something I put too much thought into.

We evaluated a few products: SolarWinds, we already have implemented monitoring other things but the virtual monitoring left me with a lot to desire.

Veeam, another application we have implemented elsewhere but was very pricey to get what I wanted.

vCOPS, very cumbersome and hard for me to trust it when the native performance monitoring doesn't work well already.

My experience with Turbonomic has been exceptional, they've offered me a $25 gift card to write a review of their company but I'd gladly write them a review for free. They really are a great company to work with and they have a great product.

We first pursued the product some years back for it's capacity planning tools but we find the continuous analysis the most useful. We can spin up new servers without a full understanding of workload values and then keep tabs on it and make adjustments as needed.

We found that if we didn't keep up with some incremental version updates, the required jump to the next version required a complete re-deploy from an image. That's avoidable by keeping up with the incremental updates.

4 years

None.

It's been very reliable.

Not applicable.

Excellent. We largely don't have to touch the product which has lead to us missing out on an occasional feature. Our rep has met with us from time to time specifically to go over things we might be missing. Very handy.

We've had excellent support including some help with getting the most out of the product. We tended to *need* a small portion of what the product can do. That can lead to missing out on neat things it *can* do, and our rep/support helped to point some of these things out for us.

No.

Initial spinup is simple from an image, with some configuration help from support at the time of implementation.

In house.

While our VM clusters are small anyway, it does let us optimize available resources at a per-VM level and keep the cluster small. We are fairly dense (VM:host ratio) and Turbonomic allows for this.

Best feature is the ability to move my virtual machines around automatically to balance out loads on each of our hosts.

This keeps our hosts optimized at all times and helps us in predicting when a new host will be needed soon.

One issue I have is just not knowing how to get some information I believe is there. I have not found any detailed walkthrough of the software and all of its features. I could call and have someone walk me through it, but would rather do this on my own time.

3 years.

No issues with deployment.

No stability issues.

None.

Any time we have talked to tech support we have had no issues. Seem to get us the answer we are looking for quickly.

No previous solution.

We have really loved having VMTurbo. It keeps out workloads spread evenly across multiple hosts and has good analytics.

- The fact that I can monitor all my environments resources from one central console.

- I can provide a report on each individual machine if requested.

- I can trust Turbonomics to streamline my environment by allowing it to perform certain actions.

It is like we hired a junior system admin that works 24 hours a day to keep our environment in top form.

The Graph and Report outputs could be improved.

We have been using Turbonomics (VMTurbo) for about 1.5 years now.

No.

No.

No.

Excellent. Rob and a few other guys from Turbonomics are always willing to help. Because I have taken over from a senior resource that has left the company, I have a standing WebEx every month to review my Turbonomics environment. They are always willing to assist.

Excellent. Almost all issues are resolved a few hours after a service call has been logged.

This is our first performance capacitor tool.

Straightforward.

Installation took place a little before my time. But as far as what I can gather, it was a hybrid of in-house and vendor. The installation was performed via a RD session.

No.

The default dashboards give an excellent view of the current health of the virtual infrastructure. But its not just current health, it give sensible recommendations for remediation. Creating custom dashboards is easy and gives quick visibility into specific groups of systems or metrics.

We have been able to get the most out of our hardware investment as its being used more efficiently. Virtual machine resource over and under commitment quickly filters to the top and can be addressed. We are also using the storage integration module which allows us to track storage performance from virtual machine to storage controller.

When trying to view a trend at 4+ day period, the trend lines tend to flatten out and move to a single data point a day.

We have been using this product for about 2 and a half years.

No issues and it can't get any easier. Love the virtual appliance deployment.

None.

None.

I'm in contact with our Customer Experience Manager every month. He is always checking to see how things are going, asking what can be improved, and offering assistance in using the functions of the product.

I've had very few interactions with support but the ones I've had have been very helpful and resolved the issue.

None.

Step 1. Deploy OVA.
Step 2. Connect to vCenter.
Step 3. Complete

Pretty Straightforward.

In-house.

There are a few we can't live without. Rightsizing (Optimization), Monthly Summary & Cluster Capacity along with the Planning.

There are no more arguments between departments anymore. We add and remove resources based off our optimization report. And we no longer have to allocate absurd amounts of resources to cover for crappy code.

Every once in a while when we perform an upgrade, it wipes out our setting. We need to go in and set it back up again. This is mildly annoying.

5 years

No - Very easy.

No

Customer Service is excellent. I have yet to open a ticket and not have my problem looked at right away. 99% of the time, the issues were resolved right away.

Excellent - Very knowledgeable

It was straightforward.

This was in-house.

You always get what you pay for.... but in this case - I feel like I get a lot more. Completely worth it.

SolarWinds - Vops (or whatever it's called now)

Turbonomics is a GREAT Product - Worth every $$..

Ease of navigation throughout the interface.  It is smooth and seamless with very little to no latency when moving between screens and objects.

As a small organization I am solely responsible for the server/storage environment. With running as lean as we do, this product has simplified the decision making process for maintaining and managing the environment.  Decisions can be made much faster as data is in front of us that is up to date and on demand.

The only areas that I believe could be improved are more built in reporting for monthly/yearly benchmarking from an executive standpoint.  For example, a report that can be used as a metric to show the overall stability of the environment from a weekly/monthly/yearly perspective such as utilization index to verify that we are using resources as efficiently as possible.

I have been using this solutions for around 9 months.

No, with the virtual appliance that can be deployed from an OVF template.  I think I was looking at the interface within a few minutes of deployment.  Just beware it does take some time to gather data that can be analyzed.

We haven't had any issues with stability.  It has thus far been very stable.

The customer service is fantastic.  I needed a custom report template built and it wasn't available on their GreenCircle support page, so they custom built a query and had it back to me within a few hours.

I evaluated a slew of solutions and Turbonomic (then VMTurbo) was heads and tails above the competition.

In-house.

Well worth the investment!

Automation and reporting.

Prior to using Operations Manager I spent a considerable amount of time evaluating VM placement. I found myself shuffling VMs between hosts on a regular basis. The automation feature of Operations Manager monitors performance and migrates VMs between hosts as needed. It has been saved me a considerable amount of time.

The product is administered using a web based interface. This interface was written in Adobe's Flash product which requires the Adobe Flash plugin to be installed on any device accessing it. Flash has had multiple security problems over the past several years and is a product I like to avoid. In addition, it's not available for mobile devices. Attempting to administer Turbonomic Operations Manager via a mobile device, like a phone or tablet, is impossible due to the Flash requirement. I would love to see this interface rewritten in HTML5. Someone from Turbonomic told me this was coming, but that was awhile ago and it still isn't here.

Over 3 years.

No. Working with Turbonomic is incredible. The company is probably the biggest reason I initially selected this product over a competitor. When requesting a trial Turbonomic arranges a meeting where they install the product in your environment and provide you with an overview of how it works. The product was deployed perfectly by a well Turbonomics employee who knew the product well.

I've been using the product for several years and have not encountered any problems relating to product bugs.

Excellent. I can't say enough about the quality of this company. For example, A few months ago our Turbonomic rep discovered I wasn't familiar with a specific feature of this product. He arranged a one to one phone appointment with a tech to teach me.

Excellent. I have only opened a relatively small number of support cases over the years I've used this product. Each case was handled quickly.

It was a simple deployment, but was done by a Turbonomic employee when our initial 30 day trial began.

Turbonomic performed the implementation. The initial setup was done fairly quickly by a very competent tech.

We looked briefly at VMware Operations Manager. We selected Turbonomic Operation Manager because of the features and level of support obtained from the company.

The planner feature is my favourite. It lets you had VMs change host RAM capacity, change IOP and NT throughput requirements, basically any scenario that an infrastructure team may get asked about by management.

The ability to group VMs together to provide service or department picture of their infrastructure is great.

Assurance spread of resources over our cluster and to right size VMs.

Due to the planner features breath of scenarios it can be a little confusing to get the right result for the scenario you need. However their are lots of videos for this and support were most helpful.

An agreement with Pernix would be helpful.

2 years

None.

Never.

None.

Excellent. They have teams dedicated to helping their customers get the most from the product.

Excellent.

Very straightforward.

In house team.

12 months - due to our conservative nature we did not turn on automation at the beginning, and the planning feature was only used during project planning phases.

vCOPS and VKernel - both were traditional monitoring tools, that are reactive, whereas VMTurbo is proactive.

The software has truly improved the performance of our VM environment.  The software has made noticeable improvements in DRS.  Turbonomics has made numerous upsizing and downsizing recommendations of virtual machines which allowed us to reclaim and redistribute valuable HW resources.

We had CPU issues with one of our SQL servers.  The software was able to provide us with recommendations on correctly sizing the platform eliminating many of the performance problems.

The software functions as advertised. There are charts and graphs in the dashboard that are confusing to read and understand.  It would be nice to have a detailed explanation of what the graph is showing directly accessible from the UI.

We've been using the software for just over 6 months.

The deployment and onsite implementation with the instructor was very helpful.

The initial setup was easy and straight forward.  The company provides you with an OVA template to get you going within an hour.