IBM Turbonomic Reviews

We have primarily used the automation features of the product to right size the VMs and migrate the VMs to best use the resources we have available.

It allows our small team manage a larger infrastructure because we can focus our efforts in other areas.

It does not fully understand our DR/SRM (active/standby) infrastructure as we have hosts with nothing on them. When running some reports the numbers are off.

5+ years

None.

Excellent.  They have gone out of their way to make sure we are happy with the product.  They have helped us make the system work for us, not against us.

Many free solutions over the years.  Needed something actively developed and reliable.

In-house deployment.

Foglight, VeeamOne, Solarwinds, Xangati

Having longer historical trending on resources has given us insight to our growth potential over the next few years.  This allows us to better budget our needs.

Trending on capacity and overall workload for multiple clusters and hypervisors.

UI can be clunky at times, they have a new UI just not fully released.

4 years

Keep your branding file handy. After updates you will need to rebrand the interface.

None.

None.

Excellent.

Excellent.

vRealize, Nagios, SCVMM.

Easy VM deployment - set an IP, set a password, give login credentials to clusters. Boom, done.

The team of me, myself and I.

I have not calculated the time saved but would guess its roughly 5-7 hours a week.

Simple, straightforward, inline with others.

eG, SCVMM, Nagios.

Reporting has added tendentious value.

Being able to easily drill-down to find root issues.

I'd like to see the GUI in HTML5 or something similar. I don't like using Adobe Flash.

A year and a half.

Nothing major, only license errors after moving from the product demo phase to the licensed version, which as an easy fix - it did not affect the functionality of the product, just annoying errors.

Nothing. I've rebooted the server once and it turned out to not be a server issue.

No, albeit I haven't scaled out much, there hasn't been any issues with adding some nodes here and there.

Top notch. They have really patient and willing to help in anyway they can. The account teams are responsive and always willing to get you to the right person to help with any issues, big or small.

They're friendly and really know the product inside and out - as well as the technologies that work with the product.

At my current company we only had the free stuff from VMware, but other products were used at previous companies like vCOPS. Pricing and user friendlies. Not feeling like a small fish in a big pond. And the product did exactly what I wanted.

Very simply and fast setup. Customizing can feel daunting at first.

Implemented with Turbonomic.

If you're on a strict budget and the numbers on the quote aren't far-off, let them work with you. I've also had sizable discounts when returning for more licensing and modules.

Foglight and vROps. Each had their strengths, but overall what suited my company's needs best was Turbonomic.

Shopping around is important and depending on what gaps you're trying to fill one product may be better than the other.

Resource Load Balancing

Right-sizing recommendations

Capacity Planning

We no longer have to constantly manually manage host utilization to keep some hosts from running much 'hotter' than others.

UI is still maturing. The UI is relatively easy to use but still does not have that professional look to it.

3 years

No.

No

Not thus far.

On a scale of 1-10, 9.5.

On a scale of 1-10, 9.

We had used the built in VMware products, they did not do as good of a job of balancing as Turbonomoic.

Very straightforward. Deploy the virtual appliance and set up vCenter connections. Creating the policies takes a little explaining but just for understanding. Once you understand what exactly you are setting up, very easy.

In-house.

The right sizing and resource balancing.

When spinning up new servers we use vendor best practices and hardware sizing documents.  Turbonomic lets us see real usage and resource requirements.

I would still like to see more canned reports for historical data.

About 3 years.

Deployment is easy.

Turbonomic is stable the only piece is the discovery could still be better.

Customer service has always been great with Turbonomic.

Previously we used vCOPS.

The initial setup is really easy and just point and click.

Deployed through in house team.

Right sizing our environment saves us money by not having to purchase additional hardware.

The reporting and capacity planning features are the most valuable for me.

The reporting features easily allows me to determine where we are having deficiencies in our virtual environment.

Our Oracle database servers requires a large amount of resources within the virtual server. Turbonomic always thinks these servers are over-provisioned and would move resources if they were configured auto mode. The performance of the Oracle database servers would not optimally run if Turbonomic made the changes it thinks necessary.

About 2 years at this point.

The support we receive from the Turbonomic's staff made the installation a breeze.

Customer Service has been very good and our rep is always reaching out to see how they can make our experience even better.

Technical Support has been good but we have not had the need to use it very often,

Very straightforward.

We implemented directly with Turbonomic and it was one of the easiest implementation we have had.

The customizable dashboard lets us get quick insight into our environment. The quick overview of your environment allows you to get to fixing the things that matter most quickly.

It allows us to plan accordingly for any future growth.

There needs to be a way to permanently ignore certain alerts, such as if you have a server where you know the HDD space is low but also know it's never going to grow any to tell it to always ignore that one. Also email alerts for HDD space do not seem to exist, or if they do they aren't working properly or they aren't self explanatory to setup.

About a year.

No, we did not have any deployment issues

No issues with stability

Customer service is top notch, the product demos and trial we got early on were very helpful.

We haven't had to use tech support yet but I'm sure they are fantastic

We did use Virtualization Manager before and it didn't seem near as robust as Turbonomic and it was more expensive so we switched.

Setup was very easy.

We implemented it with the help of VMTurbo team.

This is an overall great and easy to use product and has been very helpful in our organization, definitely recommend it!

Dashboard. Quick way to monitor the vCenter.

Improve Overall efficiency dashboard has identified resource consumption by individual VM's either to much or not enough.

Tuning VM's to the correct resource consumption, memory or CPU, has provided a true snapshot of the environments "foot print". This has aided in the correct sizing of physical machines needed to support the environment.

Definitions/descriptions of what each chart means. The line graph looks good, but doesn't mean anything without prior knowledge of what a "good UI" number is for example. I have a server with host UI of 26.7, both desired and current. I guess that is good. I see the definition of what UI is, but I'm not sure what to do if I'm not running optimal. I let Turbonomic suggest, and optimize, but still have double digit UI.

2 years

I was told to use the Chrome or Firefox browser because it works better. I don't know if that has been fixed with the later versions of both Turbonomic and Internet Explorer. I still use Chrome to use this product.

None noted.

I rate customer service as a 10/10. I've not had any issues when dealing with support or sales team.

Technical support has aided me one time, and I am totally satisfied. Quick and correct resolution.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Tech support aided in the install, and then provided training. The install and setup is straightforward.

VMturbo support/presales team installed via remote desktop.

VMware Operations Manager.

The Turbonomic solution works/performs as advertised. It automatically removes a large workload in the day to day care of my virtual environment.

Automation of tasks to keep the resources loads on my ESX servers balanced. The reporting functions also save me a lot of leg work when requests are made from those higher up about over environment performance and trends.

It keeps resources loads balanced with in my ESX clusters. Also the information about scaling up or scaling down machines is very useful as I am able to properly increase or decrease resources for virtual machines. We are more efficient and once again the reporting allows us to get pertinent data quickly.

There are a lot preconfigured reports that can be ran within Turbonomics for some of the more common information needed. To do a custom report you have to create a SQL Query string and add it as a report to gather custom information. It would be nice to have the ability to choose the contents of the reports from within the web portal as opposed to getting one from the user community or writing it yourself.

Personally, close to a year, but my company has been utilizing it for around 2 years.

No, and the upgrade process was also very easy.

Not scaling out at this point.

Account reps have been great and very engaging.

Need for technical support has been minimal.

No.

It was originally deployed before my employment, but I did do redeployment and the process was very simple.

In house.

Obviously, automation has been the most valuable feature - it's what initially attracted us and likely our main reason for purchase. However, its reporting and planning features are also very useful and contribute greatly to ROI.

Not having to regularly monitor our VM environments' resources has been a definite improvement over our previous time-intensive and often reactive processes.

Built-in, context-sensitive 'Help' would be useful at times, instead of having to search through the User Guide or Community for assistance - or just for those times when you're curious about the function of a particular option/feature.

We've had Turbonomic deployed for about 7 months now - plus the initial trial period.

Deployment was very straightforward. Transition from trial to fully licensed was just as simple.

Turbonomic has been very stable. Honestly, forget it's even running... until we need to look at a report or have growth/expansion plans for our environment.

Scalability has not been an issue. In fact, we included some additional socket licenses in our initial acquisition as we anticipated adding additional physical hosts to our environment.

Their customer service is top notch - quick to respond and very helpful. Plus, with the Green Circle Community there is the added bonus of a support group (of sorts).

I cannot speak to their technical support, as we've really not had any issues, and initial implementation was a breeze.

Other than manually monitoring and manipulating resources, DRS (which really doesn't even compare) is the closest "solution" we previously used.

Reasons for switching? Real automation, forecasting, and reporting.

As previously stated, setup was very straightforward: Deploy VM, configure connections and targets, and Automate!

We worked directly with Turbonomic - although it was called VMTurbo at the time. Obviously, their expertise was second to none.

ROI can sometimes be quite subjective. However, with Turbonomic it’s genuinely evident from the get-go. First, the automation working toward maximum
optimization, efficiency, and uptime. Second, the capacity and future planning capabilities offer the ability to generate the "what-if" scenarios using your own current environment as the model to build on.

Their per-socket perpetual licensing works very well for us. Pricing was aggressive, as compared to other options we had.