IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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.

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.