IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Most valuable to our organisation are the Planning module and the VM Rightsizing Recommendations. The planning module provide a mechanism for us to try out different scenarios based upon expected growth, ensuring that we can meet the capacity demands of our business. The VM Rightsizing Recommendations show us how over or under-utilised our resources are and makes suggestions to improve performance by adding or removing VM resources as needed.

On a daily basis we analyse the recommendations that VMTurbo provides and decide on whether these need to be followed. This ensures that our environment is running at optimal performance, providing the necessary resources that our customers need.

For us there are 2 areas that the product could be improved. Firstly the documentation and help files are not overly intuitive, providing very few examples or details on how to gain the most out of the product. The second area is around reporting. There is easy way to generate customised reports without writing complex SQL queries. A GUI report writer would greatly enhance the product.

We have had this solution in production since November 2013.

No issues were encountered with the deployment of the product.

We have experienced one issue with the product during our time using it. This turned out to be a bug and was promptly resolved as part of a subsequent patch release.

No issues have been encountered with scalability.

The customer service team were very helpful when we needed them. They were knowledgeable at initial call, and promptly got back to us after diagnosis of our problem.

The technical team are very knowledgeable of the product and we would rate their level of service very highly.

No, we did not use any previous solution.

The initial install was very straightforward. We downloaded the package and uploaded to our Virtual Environment. After following a few guided steps, it was completed.

Our implementation was done through an in-house team. No problems were experienced, and the install was well documented and straightforward.

Our ROI can be measured in the amount of server hardware that we have not had to purchase due to using VMTurbo Operations Manager. By following the recommendations of the product, and placing our VMs as recommended we estimate that we have saved ourselves in the region of $50,000+ NZD by not having to purchase at least one additional VM Host.

he original purchase cost was $11,000 USD with a setup cost of approximately $1000 USD (includes engineering time). Ongoing day-to-day costs are negligible, with time spent reading recommendations and a weekly check for updates of the product.

We did evaluate VMware vCentre Operations Manager before choosing VMTurbo Operations Manager, but found it lacked some of the important features that VMTurbo provided.

There are a few parts that I would rate higher than 8, specifically the Planning module, and one that needs more work being the Reporting module. When implementing, we would highly recommend working with the VMTurbo team to undertake some training to get the most out of the product. The documentation is not as good as it could be, so training would be invaluable.

Other than the core feature set, the planning tool has been invaluable to us.

VMTurbo Operations Manager has given myself and my staff more time to focus on other projects and tasks as well as improved overall performance of the virtual environment.

The UI could be improved.

We have been using this product for the past 11 months.

None at all, very smooth deployment and pretty easy to tune so far.

None at all.

None at all.

10/10, everyone has been very helpful and even my pre-sales guys are very easy to reach and check up on my from time to time.

10/10.

We evaluated vCOPS but decided we received way more functionality and automation with VMTurbo.

Very, straightforward setup by deploying the OVA template. You can slowly automate tasks once you’re comfortable with what its recommending.

We implemented in-house.

Within 6 months to 1 year… (helped avoid the immediate need to replace some older test storage).

We evaluated vCOPS but decided we received way more functionality and automation with VMTurbo.

Do the 30 day demo, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Most valuable features were Capacity management and hardware planning.

Provides a level of automation beyond VMware provided DRS.

Reporting is improving. GUI is ugly.

About a year.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

Great customer service.

Technical support was great.

Yes, used vKernel. Product was not being updated after multiple acquisitions.

Setup was straightforward.

Through an in-house team.

Yes. vKernel, vCOPs.

Easy virtual appliance based implementation. No advise needed.

Reporting and Automation are the most valuable features.

With the reporting I am able to 'right size' my environment from the amount of cores and memory a VM actually needs to how many hosts I need to run that environment in. With automation, my machines are moved to the most efficient host based on the data that VMTurbo gathers, this is more efficient than DRS and WAY more efficient than doing this manually.

The planning feature, though they have apparently made some gains on this with the new release coming out soon. If I use the default templates, the planning feature works great, but we were recently trying to model a plan that would make all 850 VDI desktops dual core, we had some struggles getting this to work correctly but I am told this was addressed and should have no issues with the next release.

7 Months.

No issues with deployment.

I have had some issues from time to time with DB table errors, though not sure if it is a product issue or the storage I am on. The most recent issue came from my UCS losing connection to the LAN and the storage array briefly.

I have not tried to scale yet.

They have been great so far, very attentive. If I have submitted a ticket, I get a response really quickly and the issue is generally fixed soon after.

Great as well, any time I have had an issue they have been able to jump right in and fix it.

We were using vCenter Operations manager. I made the switch because vCops gave a lot of good info, but that was all it did. VMTurbo allows me to automate the recommendations if I choose, but it also gives me visibility into the UCS infrastructure we have VMware running on. This allows me to drill in further than what I could do with vCops at a much lower price.

Very easy, just deploy the appliance and enjoy. There is very little setup that goes into this.

We did this all in-house with the help of VMTurbo.

I do not have hard data to back this up, but I would say that this product has already paid for itself in the reporting that I am able to give to management, as well as automatically moving VM’s to other hosts to better perform without any interaction from my staff.

I believe our initial investment was $25k. I don’t have a day to day number, but it is pretty low as I generally jump into it once or twice a day for 5-10 minutes to look over the main screen to see if anything is going crazy and then print off some reports for management. I have email alerting set up, but I like to jump into the main interface.

vCops and Foglight.

Just do it, it takes very little time and effort to install, and once it is the data comes in relatively fast. That data will show you immediate issues that you can address. Then set up automation to move your machines to the most appropriate hosts. After that, start digging into the planning power that this thing has, and is getting better at. I think people will be shocked at how easy this is to get going and how much information you can get from it. Spend some time really learing the workload screen as well, it is worth the time.

Smart Analytics to determine environment efficiency.

Helped to “right size” productions server environment. We now can do more with less.

Dashboard view could be improved.

3 years.

No issues with deployment.

Had 1 issue during a service pack that required me to redeploy and lose all previous history.

No issues with scalability.

On a scale of 1-10 I would say 8.

On a scale of 1-10 I would say 8.

VCOPS by vmware. Switched because Vmturbo was able to give us the reporting, planning, and migrations more easily and at a huge savings.

The initial setup was straightforward. You deploy an appliance, give it the normal basic configs (IP, Subnet, Name) then wait a few hours and you start having data to act on.

In-house.

ROI was 3 months. Could have been less if we would have acted on the recommendations earlier.

VCOPS, Veeam, Solarwinds.

Test the product give it a few days try it. You will see that it is well worth the investment.