IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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.

I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs and their solution. 

Turbonomic provides visibility and analytics into an environment’s performance. The visibility and analytics help bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams, such as Applications and Infrastructure. Having this visibility, specifically for cloud optimization, is extremely important

This has helped reduce our mean time to resolution (MTTR). On average there is about a 10% to 20% reduction, but it can be up to 60%.

Turbonomic has shortened application response time. It has made them more agile.

It's very good for optimizing the monitoring of the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and/or Kubernetes. There are some health tools. It is extremely good for that. It is good for our clients to have visibility. It helps to have a complete view of what is going on.

Their automation has helped engineers focus on innovation and ongoing modernization projects. It has saved us about 30% of our work time. Having visibility for particular solutions helped resolve issues, troubleshoot the management of clusters, and so on. It helped to reallocate resources to other parts of the business.

Our clients have seen about 10%-20% of savings from utilizing Turbonomic. 

It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well.

It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications.

I have been in the IT industry for about 25 years, and I have been working with this solution for about six years.

It is extremely stable. It works perfectly.

The scalability is okay. It sometimes has problems with the hybrid nature of things, but it is fairly scalable.

We do not use their support. Everything is done in-house.

We have used different ones provided by VMware. The solution is specific to the client. Turbonomic is one of the solutions we provide. It is extremely good and very easy to use. 

I am not involved in its deployment. In terms of maintenance, there are general updates, and making sure the platform works and you are getting what you need from it.

The deployment model depends on the requirements, but 90% of the time, it is in the cloud. In certain classes, it is deployed in the cloud, managing multiple hybrid infrastructures between the cloud and on-prem. In certain circumstances, it is separated between different sites across the globe.

I would definitely recommend a trial. It is a very good product, and it is worth its weight. It is something that is invaluable to most customers.

I would rate Turbonomic a nine out of ten.

We don't use the full functionality of Turbonomic because our company is subject to regulations around making those changes. Some of that functionality would require going through a change process. We've been using it more for heuristics and analysis on the right-sizing of our VMs and VMware.

At the resource level, Turbonomic has enabled us to right-size our converged infrastructure to a more appropriate level. Instead of using 12, we can use 10. It has been really good in helping us size the environment for our compute.

Another benefit is that it has helped reduce performance degradation. That happens at the application layer sometimes, and then a reset happens and everything is fine again. I would estimate it reduces performance degradation by 10 percent.

It has helped us streamline a lot of those applications. We're leveraging faster configurations on our VMs. Those systems that are being virtualized are operating with better peak performance whenever it's required, and that's what Turbonomic really does. It gives us insight into those peaks and valleys that we tend to go through.

The solution has also reduced resource congestion and starvation. For us, it's always a matter of refreshes. I like the forecasting tool that Turbonomic has where you punch in what you have today and it assesses the history of that setup. Then you can say, "I want to replace it with a snazzy, new compute/storage component," and it will provide a recommendation. That is a very good forecasting tool.

A lot of the features in Turbonomic are valuable. The placement features are really good, allocating the load of VMs between systems within a VMware cluster. The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature.

It also offers hot-memory increases, whenever they're applicable.

In addition, it gives us visibility and analytics into our environment, to a limited point. It does SQL components and, likely, in the newer versions, it has more of that layer. But, we're using it at the VMware level. We have tie-ins to our Pure Storage, and we're using it for discovery of that, as well as of our Cisco UCS for compute. It does delve down into the infrastructure level, if you allow it to do so.

Those analytics are important for understanding, historically, what sort of load a system handles over a certain period of time. If you have a system that is running efficiently and fine, but there is a year-end or month-end or quarterly-end report that needs to run, Turbonomic allows us to anticipate our requirements. For example, when those reports come up, it might be one of those times when we need to bump up the memory and CPU for that cycle. Turbonomic is very good for that aspect, from the standpoint of productivity. It does a lot of recommendations for placement, although we don't enable that in our environment because it's controlled. But it has a lot of good features.

Before IBM bought Turbonomic we had already been using it for four years.

The stability has been pretty good. 

One thing of note is that we did go through an upgrade from one Turbonomic appliance to a newer version and, unfortunately, a policy that was created and that was meant to be kept disabled, was transferred over and enabled. That wreaked havoc on our VMware landscape. It started making changes to servers, such as memory-up and memory-down changes, and that caused a big kerfuffle.

Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing. 

When Turbonomic was under its own flag, they would hold our hands every step of the way. That included everything from proactive upgrades to the appliance, to recommendations, and best fits for us.

When IBM bought it, we renewed the product for one more year. When I had a license that had expired, I was having such difficulty doing anything on their portal or getting support on the product. Ever since IBM took it over, it doesn't look like we have been getting the support we used to under Turbonomic.

Negative

We did not have a previous solution.

I'm the one who deployed the virtual appliance, connected it to our vCenter, and did the add-ons for Pure Storage and Dell storage. The setup, back then, was pretty straightforward. The complexity came in when we started having to use policies and rules. That's where we got a lot of help from Turbonomic.

The full deployment from end to end, with policies, took just over a couple of weeks. We have under 10 users of the product.

I did the deployment of the appliance by myself while the configuration of the group policies and rules was done with Turbonomic's assistance. There were two of us from my company who were focused on the deployment and we had two or three individuals on it from Turbonomic.

I consider the pricing to be high.

We looked at one or two other solutions, but those would probably have been renamed or rebranded since then, just like Turbonomic.

My advice would be to come up with an agreement, in writing, that support on the product will have quarterly touch-point meetings to discuss what's new, what has changed, and what upgrades there are. Those quarterly touchpoints would be an ask, for me, if I had to buy the product again. For the initial deployment, I would recommend some sort of professional services engagement from IBM, just to make sure that you're utilizing it to its best potential.

If you're looking into Turbonomic but already have a process for optimizing your environment and for monitoring, I would suggest doing a comparison between what you have today and what Turbonomic can do. Do a like-for-like on the functions you use today and ask if Turbonomic does the same and whether it does it better. Also, you need to look into the licensing model. Be ready with those questions. You want to make sure Turbonomic will be a suitable replacement and not fall short because your current tool does more.

In terms of understanding when a performance risk exists, the solution does help to a certain point. It says "increase," or "decrease." But it doesn't give explicit information as to why. It doesn't say, "This system has been running hot for X number of days or weeks." Those kinds of details aren't there. It just provides a recommendation.

I would rate the potential of Turbonomic as a seven out of 10. I love the fact that there is slight automation, if you let it do that automation, and the whole forecasting piece is really good. It's a pretty good solution.

Workload placement. The "financial" idea works very well, and has allowed us to reduce our infrastructure footprint significantly without impacting performance.

I seem to find a new bug with each new version. It's software, so I can understand, but I think the QA process needs improved.

Approximately two years.

No issues with deployment.

No stability issues.

Not yet.

I've been impressed with the customer service team's desire to help and keep things smooth.

Technical support is excellent. The support crew work very hard to ensure that we have what we need, from basic information and support, to getting custom SQL queries written.

We previously used Reflex/StrataCloud. We moved for the ease of use and the workload placement functionality.

Initial setup was performed by a teammate who has moved on, but as I recall, it was a straightforward process.

In-house.

I'm not able to speak to this. I don't have the financial data to determine a real ROI. I don't believe it's been as high as the sales team initially claimed it would be, but that's at least partly due to our environments. It's not easy to make rightsizing decisions in an environment where applications may not always be running on a box.

Take the time to evaluate the complete suite. The base package does a lot, but there are several modules that make the product more complete end to end, and are at least worth investigating.

We did not. The teammate mentioned previously had used the product in a prior role and was able to convince the required parties of the tool's value.

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 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.

• Moving VMs
• Storage moves in conjunction with DRS
• The planning function
• Rightsizing VMs

We used Turbonomic to plan our hardware refresh, and it was right on the money. Now, we are using it to plan VM moves to the cloud.

This is more of a feature request than a need for improvement. I would like to be a able to track growth over time by cluster and be able to define the clusters to use for enterprise summary. I would also like to be able to get an enterprise summary from the aggregator appliance.

Six years.

If you can download a Virtual Desk Machine (VMDK) file and assign it an IP, you can deploy Turbonomic in minutes.

Turbonomic has been very stabile.

None.

Customer Service:

Turbonomic provides excellent customer service. They are very responsive.

Technical Support:

One of the best technical support groups out of all of our vendors. They are very responsive.

Download OVF file, then configure the IP, enter your VC credentials, and boom, you are done. Just one virtual appliance.

In-house.

12 months.

vROPs.

You should at least try this out. The install is simple and the product is intuitive. What other solution is capable of showing you an issue, recommending a solution, and making the necessary changes to resolve the issue?

Automated and intelligent vMotions, VM right-sizing, storage capacity optimization, reporting, and planning.

We automate our vMotions, so it has helped us keep congestion on our hosts way down, and has been more effective than DRS. We also have used wasted storage report to reclaim over 2TB of storage from orphaned files that would have had to have been manually located before. Turbonomic has also helped with workload and capacity planning, allowing us to be more accurate with requesting expansion during budgeting.

I'd like to see an improvement in the reporting, from including more canned reports, to being able to more easily customize the existing ones (without needing to write SQL queries).

About one year.

None.

Here and there, during some older revisions. Since the 5.7 update (I believe) it's been pretty solid. Our issues seemed to relate to the discovery process and inventory, but we haven't had issues for several months now.

Nothing so far.

Very good. When I've opened cases, I get contacted quickly, and am able to work with an engineer fairly quickly. I've also posted questions and non-critical items on the Green Circle community (Turbonomic's user community), and many times I've gotten quick response from our account manager and engineers.

Very good as well.

No.

Very straightforward. It was as simple as loading an OVA, setting the networking, and pointing it at our vCenter. Tweaks have been made over time as needed, but the initial setup was quick and painless.

In-house team, with some recommendations from Turbonomic engineers.

I don't have an exact number, but we have saved lots of time on troubleshooting performance issues.

Nothing specific, just to only license what you need. For us, we license only our production environment. It would be at least a 25% increase if we licensed our development/test environment too.

We evaluated Foglight and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager before deciding on Turbonomic (or VMTurbo at the time).

No.