IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Scenario planning - The ability to look at a selection of resources and play around with different scenarios; move, duplicate, re-locate to a new cluster or DC.

The tool allows us to reduce the operational time spent managing our vSphere estate and more time developing new systems for the business.

Current toolset uses Flash and doesn't look as modern as some other platforms. The use of flash as a tool for creating the portal is dated in that most vendors are now delivering these types of web portals via HTML5 and supporting multi-device formats rather than requiring flash. The flash interface looks dated and is a little cluttered making navigating the portal less than optimal.

Other reasons flash is not desired is for the obvious security risk of enabling flash in modern browsers. Most vendors are looking to move to HTML5 or have done so. I believe that Turbonomic is actively developing an HTML5 based version of the tool as they now have a preview available within the portal of this, although I have no dates yet as to when this is meant to be made live.

Six months.

None at all.

None.

None.

Excellent. The support service is very proactive and extremely helpful with any request asked of them.

Very high. We have some challenges around restrictions of rules to certain areas of our estate which tech support assisted with in a very quick time.

Had been using vROps but product was too expensive and didn't offer the flexibility that this product does.

Setup is very easy. Takes a little extra config to add in storage arrays but well worth the extra time to do for the results that brings

In-house.

We have saved more from cost avoidance on a recent expansion than the product will cost over three years.

Look at deals that can show you an ROI within 12 months - easy to get approved and the product lives up to the hype.

No.

None.

The most valuable features to our organization is the automation of the VM’s to prevent performance issues and to balance the resources of our ESX host. The capacity planning reports are also helpful when requesting for additional hardware.

I never have to worry about the ESX host CPU and memory utilization anymore and allow VMTurbo to do its job.

The dashboard is too basic, could use more details.

3 years

No issues with deployment.

Had issues with the product in the past, where it wasn't reporting correctly. I don't recall the fix, but the support was able to resolve the issue.

No issues have been encountered with scalability

Customer server is always great and respond to my tickets quick.

The technical team are very knowledgeable of the product and knows when to ask for senior assistant when needed.

Never use any previous solutions.

The initial setup was straightforward. Download the appliance and deploy it to our vCenter, configure the network settings and that was pretty much it.

The vendor team assisted with the implementation and we didn't encounter any issues, so they knew what they were doing.

Management dealt with the licensing and pricing.

We looked at vCenter operations manager, but at the time VMTurbo offered more features.

This is a great product, once it's set up, you hardly need to login to the interface.

Storage Analysis and Automated Datastore migration.

Allowed us to concentrate less on the day to day optimization and more on the big picture of utilization.

Interface needs to loose Flash completely and switch to HTML5.

1.5 years

No, the product ran just fine, though on a couple of occasions performing a version upgrade did not complete and required several attempts.

No, we scaled our ESXi hosts and VMTurbo scaled accordingly.

Excellent! Both pre-service and post-service were world class. The company has a vested interest in ensuring their customers know what they are buying and are supported with great care.

Excellent as well. Minor issues with version updates were quickly corrected/addressed and questions about configuration and optimization were handled very promptly.

No.

Very straightforward and simple. Adding monitored components was a bit cumbersome and required some help from support but in the end everything was successfully identified and properly connected.

In-House!

Hard to put in exact numbers, however many hours have been saved each week in optimization and monitoring.

Ensure to order the correct/complete modules for your environment and equipment.

No.

Great solution, great future.

One of the most valuable features for us was the automation aspect. Defining policies to automate the recommendation process helped us in saving valuable time and reducing manual workload. Going one step further we will be implementing the automatic deployment of hosts based on the desired state information coming from Turbonomic. This way we can have hosts dynamically installed and booted based on our workload.

We have been able to reduce manual labor in keeping our environment healthy performance wise.

One of the areas of improvement are the UI. The current UI feels a bit out dated. Although all information is readily available and easily accessible. From what I have heard and seen at VMworld 2016, a new UI is in development and will be released shortly.

1 year.

Deployment is very simple and straightforward.

None.

Due to the ability to link multiple instance to each other, it can easily be scaled and segmented.

The contacts we had with customer service have been top notch. Very friendly, always willing to help and quick response.

Same as the customer service.

Very simple and straightforward.

In-house.

Less load.

The Capacity Planner was invaluable when doing a server consolidation / host migration project. On a daily basis, I tend to use the "To Do List" in order to keep my systems efficient.

I'm able to work in a more proactive manner and now have less issues to deal with. I'm able to avoid major problems.

I'd like to see the creation of custom dashboards become a little more streamlined. I love the concept, but it's the thing I have struggled with the most thus far. I am trying to get dashboards created for application groups, only giving them exposure to certain elements. I can't get as granular as I would like. It also takes several steps in quite a few screens to get things going.

About 10 months.

Deployment and training were both EXCELLENT.

The system has been stable since day one.

Every support engineer I have worked with has been friendly, professional and knowledgeable.

10 of 10

It was very straightforward - deploy the appliance, add my vCenter Servers and wait for data to populate. Doesn't get much easier than that.

I implemented the appliance myself with the help of VMTurbo

The pricing is competitive and the licensing model is flexible. We knew that we would be significantly reducing our host count over the six months following implementation. There were license options available for this exact type of scenario

Dell Foglight and SolarWinds.

We purchased this product because it was the best that we evaluated. I'm very happy with our choice.

Removes the need to monitor our virtual environment and I receive daily reports on actions taken for that given day.

We see increased speed in our environment as VM's are moved based on needs and requirements.

Could be more user friendly, but the provided training provided the needed clarity.

The product comes with a ton of features and options, which without training seemed overwhelming.

6 months.

No.

No.

No.

Very good.

Very good.

Install is very simple - used the free version at first.

Call the sales team and ensure you get the solution that fits your needs.

The automation in Turbonomic is priceless, and all the dashboards, native or custom build, give a complete virtual and physical hardware performance view.

Our servers are now correctly utilized, and I am now able to test a complete disaster recovery procedure, or plan a new VM or host implementation.

Since Turbonomic can do so much, it can be a complex system to look at for one that haven’t laid eyes on it before. But there is a possibility to test out the new design, and that looks to improve on this issue.

About 8 months.

None.

None.

Excellent!

Excellent!

Advanced load balancing capabilities, also across clusters. The storage load balancing has helped us avoid LUNs going full. Also, the ability to show historic peak values for guest metrics is a wonderful tool for rightsizing guests.

Turbonomic has helped mitigating the risks of LUNs filling up and resource congestion on individual hosts.

An option to remove unlicensed features from the dashboard would be welcome. We're licensed for the "Workload Edition", so any features that are available only to the "Application Edition" or "Cloud Native Edition" could be hidden from the GUI to avoid misunderstandings, and getting less clutter.

Besides having to manually set "no access" on clusters we did not want to license, it was a breeze.

None yet.

None.

They have been very helpful every time we've been in contact.

Turbonomic's best features for my needs are the autonomic scheduling, capacity planning, and right sizing capabilities. It is like VMware DRS and SDRS on steroids, predicting VM contention issues before they happen and migrating workloads accordingly.

I no longer have to worry about workload management, and when it comes time to plan for expansion it is no longer a hardware guessing game. Turbonomic can tell you exactly what hardware you will need based on the proposed workload. You can even input your own desired hardware configs to get more precise details on the report.

Turbonomic's current UI is coded in Flash though they have stated an HTML5 version is coming soon.

5 years.

No issues with deployment, however my original virtual appliance was so old that support had to forklift upgrade the database this year to their newer version so I could get the latest code. Was very simple and painless.

None.

None so far. My environment doesn't task the scalability meter though.

10/10

10/10

I previously looked at vCenter Operations Manager (previous name of vRealize Ops Manager) and it was not nearly as feature rich at Turbonomic at the time.

Not at all, deploy it, give it an IP or DHCP then connect to vCenter. 2-3 hours later you will start to see recommendations.

In-house, implemented it myself.

ROI on this tool was within 3 months. We had over-provisioned on the virtual and physical side after our previous upgrade to the VMware systems. Turbonomic brought our virtual infrastructure back down to size and saved us from upgrading hardware again for over a year.

They license by socket. Buy for the sockets you need.

They have a free version of the exact same appliance which just has features greyed out. Try it out and see what they can do for you for free straight from their website.

Turbonomic helps me maintain a lean operations team. What used to take half my day now is automated. ROI on this is a no-brainer.

Better vMotions decisions than DRS.

Showed us how to merge clusters to increase density.

Waiting for the HTML5 GUI since flash has refresh issues.

2 years.

No.

No.

No.

Perfect. Attention to details on every open ticket.

Top notch effort put into each support request.

Painless.

Better algo (looks at more metrics) than VMware's DRS.