IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Turbonomic has tons of features that we use regularly from reports showing us simple IOPS stats, to showing over/under utilized VMs, and even wasted space on our datastores.  We run a cloud for many customers 24/7 and we are not staffed 24/7 so this keeps metrics for what is going on while we sleep.

Simple vCenter performance charts will show you only latency on datastores and will not drill down to show VMs causing the trouble.  Turbonomics will show the IOPS and which VM is causing it easy. 

Reports take time to custom tweak.

Nearly 3 years.

This is a simple appliance deployment so its almost as easy as it gets.

No issues.

No issues.

Service is fantastic and always willing to help us with questions regarding licensing and other features.

We were looking at vCops originally and the prices would not even compare with nearly 0 compromise.

I never regretted going with Turbonomic over vCops and would easily do it again.

Automation options for moving and resizing VMs as necessary have been crucial for our environment's performance.

Automating move and resize tasks have allowed our team to spend less time micro-managing VMs and more time completing projects.

Alert emails could be more comprehensive. The name kind of drives me crazy...It's difficult to say "Turbonomic" in conversation and have someone take you seriously.

I have used it for almost a year.

I encountered minimal deployment issues; we were lacking proper licensing for our environment's hardware.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

Initial setup was very smooth and easy to execute.

Be very clear about what your needs are to ensure you receive proper licensing.

It automatically adjusts resource allocations and VM placement to improve utilisation and ensure service delivery. Increased visibility and control has meant higher VM density per host. The 'plan' tab allows for accurate capacity forecasting for upcoming projects.

We now have intelligently controlled VMs with consistent performance, it has helped us avoid purchase of additional hardware and software through increased utilisation in excess of 90%. It also eliminated configuration and capacity planning guesswork and has even identified where people have over-provisioned VMs so we can take back those resources and use them for other VMs.

User Interface can initially seem a bit 'busy', but you get used to that once you learn what it's showing you.

We have used this for 2 years

No, it only took 15 minutes to get up and running!

Initially there were some minor problems in the earlier releases, but these appear to have been overcome and the product has been very stable for at least the past 12 months.

No

Very good

Excellent, VMTurbo even proactively contact us when new releases come out to ensure we have been able to update ok and to explain the new features of that release.

We used to manually try and work out where we had spare resource using tools like vCenter and NetApp System Manager, we had to move to something more intelligent as it was clear that we had untapped resource available, but we couldn't identify with 100% certainty where it was.

Very straightforward, we powered up the trial VMTurbo virtual appliance, gave it an IP address, pointed it at vCenter and the NetApp clusters and started using the product straight away.

In-house

Our ROI was less than 12 months as we would otherwise have needed to purchase additional hardware and VMware licenses during that time period, as we were previously adding at least 4 CPUs worth each year.

2 years later we still haven't had to purchase any more, even though we have had a significant increase in the total number of VMs running in the environment.

It's very reasonable when you compare it against the cost of buying more VMware hosts, licenses and potentially storage. Don't forget to include the ongoing support costs for the additional hardware and VMware licenses as those really rack up over the 3-5 year lifespan of a server!

We looked at vCenter Operations Manager, but the effort involved just to stand up a PoC environment was significantly more than with VMTurbo, so after a web demo of vCOps we decided not to proceed with that option.

Give the demo version a go, you might be surprised by the results!

The most valuable feature for us is the feature which allows Forecasting. Forecasting allows you to forecast and simulate new environments so you can decide what to add to your environment and what won't work. Looking to add Cisco nodes, for example, I can add new hardware and test and predict how our investment will impact our performance.

The direct impact is that we decided to expand our platform and I needed specific numbers to see how a specific node would impact our environment, we were able to get specific reporting. That’s direct ROI. The feature that allows you to optimize and distribute your loads according to the balance of your “sweet point,” balancing your load against your compute is very valuable for decision making.

I think that the interface can use some modernizing and less abrupt transitions. There has already been a good attempt but need to dig deeper.

We have been using the solution for one year.

No, it was great.

No issues with stability.

They are very responsive.

They are great - very responsive.

We have tried other solution, VCOPS as well as Virtual Instruments. VMTurbo was unique – other products were not as complete a match.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Price is a little bit steep – if you have a targeted project, then its worth it, otherwise ongoing costs can be a little steep.

Understand the product and what it does, it falls into a little bit of a luxury tool, know how they approach the problem and you have to know your platform. This is not the kind of thing you buy off the shelf.

The Automation and Planning capabilities are unique, innovative, and game-changing for us.

We are able to maintain a much higher level of performance and efficiency in our virtual environment with the same or reduced levels of staffing.

We would like to see VMTurbo develop more application-specific modules that give us additional visibility into the end-user experience.

18 Months.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No problems with scalability.

Excellent.

Excellent.

We used monitoring tools like Solarwinds Orion and vFoglight. They're fine products but they don't really compete with VMTurbo in that they are not actually performing command and control operations. VMTurbo actually does things way beyond DRS and Storage DRS. Our monitoring solutions just overwhelmed us with data and there's a big difference between knowing a problem exists and proactively preventing or fixing one without human involvement.

We simply installed their VM and turned it on. Thirty minutes later we made the decision to go live with virtual machine automation and have not looked back.

No, we did it ourselves with relatively minimal support from VMTurbo.

I would say we recouped our investment within two months. We were purchasing an average of six or seven hosts per year (at $20K-30K each). Based on the increased awareness of our infrastructure utilization rate, and VMTurbo-driven performance efficiencies, we eliminated the need to buy and deploy any new servers for 18 months.

I think our startup cost was around $49K (plus another $40K or so for the VNX storage module eight months later). The day-to-day cost is about $50/day.

Just load the demo. It's completely non-invasive and you will probably be blown away by how much over-provisioning you have been doing.

• After implementation and turning on the VMTurbo DRS in automated mode we recognized better and balanced performance on hosts and VM's.
• We use the reports and reclaimed a lot of wasted storage.

There are fewer tickets about VM performance problems.

3 Years

No. It comes as a virtual appliance which is installed and configured quickly. The update process to a newer version or patch level is simple.

No, very stable.

No issues with scalability.

Excellent

The support team at VMTurbo is so quick in responding. I always get an answer to my questions and they always get me the support I need when I need it. I’ve been very impressed.

We use other Monitoring Tools but not with these automation features.

It comes as a virtual appliance which is installed and configured (IP Settings / vCenter connection) quickly. Around half an hour and you are ready to use it. Some hours later the first recommendations come up.

In-house

Another aspect of being a VMTurbo customer is being a member of the Green Circle Community, an online community for innovators, virtualization experts and forward thinking IT professionals who engage with one another and share their experiences.

I’ve been involved since the beginning of the Green Circle,and it’s been such a great platform to engage with and help others.

The community is so diverse, and you know that what you read is true.

• The dashboard, reporting and planning. The dashboard being so customizable makes it very powerful for myself and other team members as it is able to be scoped to whatever the team needs.
• With numerous teams focusing on their own area, it makes it a breeze to set their dashboard to what they want to see, whether it be DBAs, storage or unix team, application owners, they each get their own view into their environment.
• The new reporting function is amazing. Anything you see on the screen, be it dashboard or drilling down to the individual virtual machine, with a click of a button, you can get a report on it.
• The planning feature is amazing as it can help with rolling out mass VMs for say, like a VDI rollout. It helps you determine what the load would be if you add xx amount of VMs.

It gives us a quick look into what the environment is doing, down to the individual application, on the fly. We can find misbehaving VMs very quickly and to see what is related to it, be it storage or network.

The UI could be a little more user friendly and less buggy. When working heavily in VMTurbo, you need to occasionally log out and back in to the site as flash will have problems.

About two and a half years.

None at all. Very quick and easy to roll out. We are mostly a Hyper-V shop and downloading a new appliance and setup is fast and very quick.

The appliance is pretty stable, which is to be expected since it runs under Linux.

With any application like this, the more information it holds, the slower it could take. We have roughly 80 hosts and about 3500 VMs in it and it might take some time to complete a full discovery, but it is negligible considering the importance of the data.

10!! One of the things that sets VMTurbo apart from other vendors is the feeling of family. They truly want to help get any issue resolved as soon as possible. Their customer service is directly related to their product. You can tell right away that the techs, engineers and sales people care about the software.

10/10.

We used Microsoft's Operations Manager in tandem with this application. VMTurbo has a lower learning curve on use and setup.

The initial setup is very straightforward. When you get into the actual configuration for your specific environment, it is recommended to have one of the VMTurbo folks on the phone to walk you through some of the intricacies of the software.

This was installed in-house.

ROI is difficult for us to gauge as we are non-profit and specifics are not really tracked.

We have only used Microsoft Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager, neither was set up to give us the in-depth look that VMTurbo was designed to do out of the box.

Whether you have a single, specific virtualization technology or a multi-platform environment, you need this software if you want to see end to end in your environment.

Automation and the sizing function have been very valuable. As a multi-tenant cloud services provider, our engineers also rely heavily on the reporting function as one of their main go to tools.

There are a couple improvements: The sizing functions and the reporting are instrumental for the 600 engineers that login and use the product. They take the reports in both a troubleshooting capacity but also in a business review capacity, where they are able to share the trends with the client. Since our organization provides managed services to our clients, it is important our engineers are able to retrieve not only real-time data but the recommendations and rightsizing information instantly. VMTurbo’s automation component continuously helps us get the most out of our cloud infrastructure.

The reporting, there is always more information that could be extracted. VMTurbo as well as the Green Circle Community continuously adds/improves on the reporting. The other area would be visibility into bandwidth utilization. We presently use another tool to extract this information for each of our tenants. It would be nice to have this in a single pane of glass within VMTurbo Operations Manager.

We been using VMTurbo for almost two years.

I've upgraded at least 7/8 times. A couple of versions had issues but were remediated along the way.

It seems to be fairly stable.

Definitely scalable. Our licensing scheme allows us to go into and discover some of the acquisition environments that we've done and see what virtual environments these acquisitions have fairly quickly.

It's always been good - 10/10.

10/10.

We used a combination of solutions beforehand. In terms of VMTurbo I liked what I saw - scalability, the automation, etc. While we haven’t taken full advantage of every aspect VMTurbo has to offer, those modules and workflow we’re presently using have made an impact in our support to our clients.

Initial setup was straightforward.

In-house. I had contacted support on an as-need basis.

Right out of the box the hypervisor support is strong. VMWare shops probably get the most bang for your buck. UCS may be of use as well - additionally NetApp. Companies that have a single domain would find it easier to roll out the application management module due to only requiring the single set of credentials for deployment. Whereas in a multi-tenant environment, the provider requires visibility into each tenant’s domain which requires additional planning and may require a security design change.