IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Turbonomic (VMTurbo), once it is set up and running, works behind the scenes to run the VMs as efficiently as possible based on the available resources.

Turbonomic, per its design, finds bottlenecks and, depending on how it is configured, recommends actions and takes action to resolve the bottlenecks. Bottlenecks could be related to RAM, CPU, disk IO, etc.

Instead of buying more RAM for ESX hosts, Turbonomic managed the VMs in a more efficient way than DRS. The software makes recommendations of increasing the number of ESX hosts.

After our ESX lease was up and we purchased new hardware with more RAM, we continue to use Turbonomic in our development and UAT lane. I expect to use this product when using the cloud as the cost of CPU and RAM in the cloud will be prohibitive.

Turbonomic is not easy to use out of the box. It took a two-day session with an on-site tech to get up to speed.

The product's economics terminology is initially foreign to a system administrator.

There are many options in this application and if the admin is not using the app frequently it is easy to forget.

Six months.

Customer service was pretty responsive.

Technical support was pretty responsive. Issues that could not be immediately resolved were escalated to Engineering/development.

We got help from an on-site tech to perform the install.

Action mode policy which allows us to manage our environments on a more proactive front.

We are a very small staff, and this gives us a peace of mind that our servers will run optimally.

Wish the storage move accounts for possible VMware snapshots that existed on some host.

3 years.

None

None

We have added additional hosts quite easily.

Excellent

Excellent

No, we had just relied on the the build in vCenter server tools.

Although VMTurbo assisted with the install, is was very straightforward. The same goes for the upgrade process.

Yes, we did evaluate other products but to be honest, I cannot recall at this time.

The product has worked great. It has become a set and forget tool for us which is a good thing.

Reports on recommended right-sizing for VMs.

Getting the numerous VMs properly sized has saved a fair bit in hardware and licensing costs.

The UI needs to be finally and fully moved to pure HTML5 and NOT flash.

They are transitioning the UI to HTML5, but the GA release (as far as I know), is still in flash.

Two years.

No.

No.

No.

An eight out of 10

An eight out of 10

WhatsUp Gold, though it is not really the same thing.

Very straightforward.

In-house.

Seven months

vRealize, Foglight, VeeamOne

VMTurbo is unique in its approach to resource usage tracking and recommendations based on it. There is no other tool I have found that can do what it does the way it does it. Highly recommended.

The real time resource usage and capacity planning have been essential to my work.

As a one man IT department, keeping track of resource use across multiple sites has been complicated at best. With Operations Manager, I can see my entire infrastructure in one view, in real time.

Personally, I find the interface, especially for a new user, to be less than user friendly. I don't think this is an issue due to a poor product, but more because the product can do so much, finding the simple tasks can be difficult. After using for a while, it makes sense, and navigating becomes easier.

Less than 1 year.

None, deployment was smooth and easy.

No.

Top Notch. The one time I need to contact support, they were responsive and courteous.

I have only needed support once, and the technician was knowledgeable and helpful in resolving my issue.

No.

Very straightforward. It took me longer to identify a free IP address on my network than to get the software running.

Direct from Turbonomic.

The pricing is quite fair, especially compared to VMware Operation Manager.

My review is unbiased and true to my use, however I was promised compensation for my review.

Turbonomic's realtime environmental monitoring and aggregated dashboard have been instrumental in expansion decision making for our infrastructure.

Based off it's metrics, we were not only able to expand our storage environment but fine tune our environment further in order to achieve maximum performance.

Performance tuning and storage replacement.

Going on 2 years now.

Super easy to deploy, was up and running in 20 minutes.

Stability has never been an issue with Turbonomic.

Additional licensing purchases were the only issues for scalability.

Customer service has been amazing as well as their community base.

I would rate them a 10/10.

Yes, there were a few different solutions in place before Turbonomic. After implementation of Turbonomic the switch was easy as it had every metric and report I needed from a director's standpoint and didn't need to jump systems to make it work.

It was very straightforward. It's own ISO made it super simple.

In-house deployment was our method.

Automatic Equilibrium using real-world metrics and dynamically balancing workloads while adding new applications into the environment.

It has allowed me to manage over 19 sites with one person after losing two supporting staff members without a negative impact on operations.

I would love more training and certification opportunities.

Over 2 years without issue.

Best deployment of an application I have seen yet. Import OVA, assign basic network resources and use an admin account to find balance in the datacenter.

The OVA provides great tools for backup and import but in operation I have not had a unit fail on me and reboots have resolved most of my operational issues.

None

Excellent. Very involved and positive experience with all members at Turbonomics!

Excellent. Super humble, very helpful.

I felt like a tourist talking to NASA engineers in terms of skill level.

Cost and recurring license costs did not make sense with other solutions when I POC'd solutions in the real-world. Everything else required more people, expertise, or money for less function.

Unit was up and running in 5 minutes. All I needed was basic networking information and admin accounts

In-house.

Compare it to other solutions and you will find that the equilibrium equation is not available with other solutions. I feel this tool is the equivalent of two engineers under me .

Within 15 minutes of deploying the virtual appliance, we had some valuable data about our environment and starting using the recommendations for VM resizing and moves within the 32 blade cluster. After about a month of following the recommendations, we found we trusted Turbonomic enough to start automating the resizing and moves. Recently, we've even used it to vacate an entire storage array onto a new one for about 1800 VMs. Everything worked flawlessly without a hiccup.

It has essentially replaced the need for 2-3 operations personnel managing requests for RAM/CPU resizing for VDIs. 

Would still like the ability to pick tiers of performance for workstations. For instance, would like to create a group wherein workstations could only scale between 4-8GB RAM, 8-16GB, 16-32GB, etc. This would fall inline with VMWare's Horizon Air performance tiers. 

We've been using Turbonomic almost 18 months now. 

Very simple to deploy, less than 20 minutes before we could start seeing data and recommendations on our environment. 

Certain versions have had glitches in the past but they've usually been fixed or patched within a matter of days. One such instance was RAM scaling over 160GB on certain VMs for no apparent reason. 

10/10. They've been quick to respond each time we need help with a new feature or we notice something odd. 

Turbonomic essentially pays for itself in the first 30 days of use. Can completely replace an operations team for maintaining a healthy environment. 

Today we have found the forecasting of the environment and optimization the most beneficial. 

The automation of VMotion allows us to avoid over utilized memory and CPU on our Hosts.  Turbonomic also addresses the issue of I/O on our network something that has been a concern at times in the past.

The graphical interface could be better.

We began looking at this solution about a year ago and after Proof of Concept finally implemented a few months back.

Yes

Automated move and workload placement.

Resource planning.

Planning for capacity is much easier now. It is relatively simple to model growth based upon expected company growth for a given cycle, allowing us to acquire the necessary hardware in time to meet the demand.

The interface could use an update. Additional options in data views and dashboards would be welcome. We would also like to see expansion made in the UCS tools that they provide, to allow viewing the entire UCS environment and not just the equipment that hosts a hypervisor.

We have used Turbonomic (VMTurbo) for about 3 years. It replaced VCOps at the time.

None. The solution was easy to implement although we did wait a while to allow it to perform changes on its own.

We were affected by a bug in a release. This did result in unplanned downtime for us. We have modified our policies on updates/patches as a result.

None. The software was been able to keep pace with our environment as it has grown and the licensing model allows us to true up yearly.

Excellent. Both the sales and support staff have been very accommodating but not suffocating.

Excellent. We have been aligned with the proper resources to analyze and provide solutions to the problems we have encountered. The responses from tech support have been transparent and they have provided as much information as possible to be sure we are satisfied.

VMware vCenter Operations - prior to the VRealize operations incarnation.VCOps provided additional metric data and heat maps to gain additional insight into our VMware installation, but we were still left to decide what this data meant and how to improve our performance. Turbonomic makes plain English suggestions on how to optimize our install base.

The setup was simple, with the deployment of a virtual appliance. Updates are similarly easy. The only issue is the time necessary for Turbonomic to observe the environment before it can provide actionable data.

In house. The solution did not seem intimidating enough to require engagement of an outside resource. That being said, we have not implemented all of the features of Turbonomic either. Perhaps with a Vendor would would have had a greater feature set in place.

Our ROI occurred in less than 6 months by allowing us to avoid a costly server upgrade that was planned for parts of our VMware infrastructure.

Turbonomic was able to accommodate our perhaps unique needs in purchasing. Capital expenditures are easier for our team to make versus subscriptions Operating expenditures. Turbonomic offered both models and made it easy for us to even switch between them.

We had a prior installation of VCOperations. We did not feel we were getting real value from that installation - or at least that the release of vCOPS that we were on was not providing value.

Turbonomic was positioned perfectly to take advantage of a lack of metrics and tooling that was available for VMware at the time. Their tools were superior to even those provided by VMware. The market has since caught up, and there are many more competitors in this space. Turbonomic will need to continue to innovate and compound upon what makes them unique to stand out.

Capacity Planning

It allowed us to plan and scale our capacity based on our sales pipeline.

The UI, existing plan modification and the reports layout.

Yes, after every major update a new bug would cause an issue requiring another update.

4/5

3/5