IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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

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.