IBM Turbonomic Reviews

We use Turbonomic to gather information that we can archive and review when there are performance issues or other problems. We look at the statistical data and see what was going on at that particular time across the cluster and if there was an issue. I generally look at the underlying resources, IOP utilization, CPU, CPU-ready ballooning, and anything that might cause performance issues.
Turbonomic is better than using the native vCenter to look at that and we didn't have vROps or anything.

Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation.

The solution's analytics are less important today because of changes in our environment. When we started using it, it was essential because we had more performance issues with the technology we had at the time. Turbonomic helps us interpret data alerts and speed sheets, which also isn't as important as it used to be. The solution helped to reduce performance degradation in the past, but it's less of an issue these days because we have optimized our environmental design.

Turbonomic reduced our mean time-to-resolution by about 50-60 percent when I used it for that. I can't say that it has improved our information sharing because our IT team is super small. We've got three people that are on the infrastructure. However, I have some experience with much larger environments, and the information that's in Turbonomic is easier to consume for some IT teams that maybe aren't as familiar with the virtualization environment.

It improved our application response time when we used it a lot more for performance analytics. We could see what consumed more IOPS and put it on the appropriate lens, where memory was not assigned properly. We could increase memory utilization or CPU. 

We can identify what is over-provisioned or if there are too many IOPS going through a particular data endpoint. CPU processor utilization, memory ballooning, etc., impact performance. 

Turbonomic provides many recommendations for right-sizing VMs for the tasks they're doing. That saves us significant time because we don't need to look at all that information and use calculators to figure it out. Turbonomic can tell you. Turbonomic reduced the time spent managing the performance of existing assets, freeing up time to do extra development work. 

I saw improvements in application response times when I used it regularly to look at performance gains. We achieved an improvement of around 20 percent in heavy application performance by right-sizing VMs and ensuring resources were appropriately assigned. 

The sizing information is the most useful aspect of Turbonomic. It helps us know which machines are over-provisioned or under-provisioned. I also like the historical information from the environment about performance metrics, utilization, and the like. It's nice to go back and look at what was happening in it at any particular time.

I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable.

I have used Turbonomic for nearly nine years.

Turbonomic is highly stable. We haven't ever had any issues with the product.

Our environment is smaller, and we don't add many resources to what we have. However, it seems to scale pretty well based on what I know about the product.

I rate Turbonomic support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Setting up Turbonomic was pretty straightforward. You deploy the OVA, answer some questions, and point it at your environment. It's one of the easier infrastructure products to implement. I deployed Turbonomic in one afternoon, so it was a couple of hours max. After deployment, we had to install regular updates, but it was easy to do. Two people are involved in maintaining the product. 

In the past, we've seen a return, but it's currently hard to justify the recurring cost.

We evaluated vROps before selecting Turbonomic. Setting up vROps was much more complex. It required more overhead and maintenance. Getting the information we needed was more complicated. 

I rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten overall. I recommend evaluating it. Turbonomic might be easier than the product you currently use. You might be able to use the DRS mechanism in Turbonomic to get recommendations, and auto-sizing could make your life a lot easier.

Provides automation of the workloads to the best hosts and trending of resource capacity over time. We constantly focus on this as a service provider.

We have a relatively small team for these tasks. We want to ensure that we have automation to provide our clients with the best experience, as well as reducing our overall labor. These factors are critical to our success.

The user interface is quite dated. There is a new UI release on the horizon and some of the new UI elements are in the newest version. It would also be good to have an overview of the environment of improvements. In addition, VMtools out of date, as are the phantom files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were no deployment issues.

There were no stability issues.

No scalability issues,so far and we have 20 hosts.

I would give customer service a rating of 9/10.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

We used vMan from SolarWinds. We wanted a product that enabled more automation of tasks and intelligent load balancing.

The setup was straightforward. You simply install the OVA, set the IP, and plug it into your Vcenter.

We did the implementation in-house.

We have been seeing a 4-6 month time window where we have been able to extend before procurement of additional hosts which have been required.

Alongside the additional labor, we save approximately $4500/month.

Ensure that you do a multi-year agreement to get the best discounts.

We looked at vMan and vROps.

VM automation to keep clusters' performance at its best.

Keeps clusters aligned, compute wise. We also use the planning and forecasting tools to determine needs.

Planning tools could be easier to use. Depending on your needs, it can be time consuming to get what you want.

A few years now.

No.

Every so often, and it usually needs a reboot to recover.

Not yet.

Customer success team is awesome. Sometimes the support team can take a long time to respond.

Good, but slow at times. If it's a really hot issue we can usually get a quick response though, after escalation.

Native VMware tools.

Easy.

In-house.

More of a cost avoidance for us, meaning that it saves us from over-provisioning and allows more density.

Yes.

The Turbonomics team is always looking for ways to improve their product. They are also willing to engage the customer success team to help us find new ways or easier ways to get more from the product. This is refreshing in a world where, after purchase, you are usually on your own after installing, other than support. That is not the case with this team.

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!

We looked to this product to help us to right-size our virtual machines and containers. Most people who request virtual machines tend to request more resources than they need, and most of the time it's hard to prove that they don't.

Our environment is entirely on-premises. We have virtual machines and Kubernetes running on some of those VMs. We also have plans to go to the cloud with some workloads in the future, so it's good to have this tool to help get the sizing just right when the time comes to pull the plug.

Turbonomic has been helping us use our resources more efficiently, the challenge we currently face internally is getting people to allow the servers to be turned off to make the changes recommended.

I also like the planning tool, which is helpful to make sure we have enough capacity for failing over one datacenter to the other in case of disaster, while still maximizing what we already have and helping to keep us from making host purchases we don't need yet. It's nice not having to make all those calculations on my own.

At the moment, I have only really had the opportunity to manage virtual machines with it.

We're starting to let it look at our Kubernetes workloads as well.

The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be. However, I haven't reached that point yet. That is the plan for the future though.

I really like the planning tool so I can make sure we have enough resources for upcoming projects that require servers, while still having enough resources for our disaster recovery failover needs.

The reporting feature could be made a little more seamless with the rest of the tool. It would be nice to be able to share and print the reports a little more easily.

Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI.

The upgrade process is a bit tedious, but I know the team is working on that.

The ability to set the scope at the dashboard level and let it flow down to all the widgets you add would be amazing. Having to select the scope per widget is a bit tedious.

We have been using Turbonomic for just under a year.

It is pretty stable, we have not had issues with that.

Turbonomic seems scalable to me.

Technical support is where Turbonomic shines.

Lots of features are still in the works but the company really makes sure you have a lot of attention and support after the sale, which is sometimes hard to get. Most of the time, once a vendor has your money, you never hear from them again. However, I have had a great experience with post-sales support and a lot of hand-holding.

It is really well done on their part to make their customer happy.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Deployed was completed in-house.

We have no ROI so far.

It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it.

We evaluated VMware vROps before selecting Turbonomic.

Turbonomic is hyper-visor agnostic, so we use it to monitor both our VMware and XenServer environments. It helps identify when a virtual machine needs additional resources or to be migrated to another host. The migration we allow to happen automatically. However, changing resources we look at the recommendation and may or may not take the suggestion for various reasons. 

Due to the loss of our primary VMware administrator, my colleagues had to take over managing the virtual environment. There were settings for various reservations set at one of our locations. Although memory/CPU may have been increased at some point on these systems, it was not until Turbonomic recommended increasing the reservations that we realized these settings were in place.

More recently, we have used it in planning data center upgrades. It allowed us to determine how many additional blades we may need due to upcoming projects. We built a template on the new model of blades we were considering, and of the new SAP HANA VM's we were going to be needing. It provided a plan of how many blades we would need to add to the environment to accommodate this expansion, which allowed for more accurate budget planning. 

When you log in to Turbonomic, I find the Assure Service Performance that appears on the dashboard the most useful item. This option shows virtual machines that may need additional memory, CPU, or to be migrated to other storage to ensure performance. The product can be configured to do all of this automatically, but I like have more control of the changes. Plus, the way we have our storage configured, it is best that one of the admins selects which data store a machine is migrated to. I also like the reporting feature and have several of them set to automatically generate and email to me at the end of the month. One in particular shows snapshots that are still on the virtual machines. This prevents forgotten snapshots from existing for weeks, months, or even years.

Based on the way we currently use the product I do not have any recommended improvements. However, we do not have may of the automated features configured at this time.

Three to five years.

No issues with stability.

There have been no issues with scalability. Currently, it is used to monitor several hypervisor environments including XenServer, VMware, VXRail, etc.

Customer Service:

The customer service has always been very responsive and friendly.

Technical Support:

Technical support responds quickly and always keeps you updated on any issues that may require some research. One of the processes is uploading or exporting a copy of your current environment. This gives support a copy of your environment to try to replicate a problem, if needed.

We previously had vCOPS, but that was charged per VM and could not monitor and report on our XenServer environment.

Setup is relatively straightforward. There is a template to deploy and configure the initial IP address. After that, the rest of the configuration is performed through the web GUI. This includes adding various environments, setting up reports, configuring actions, etc.

Since we were an early adopter, the deployment was performed with in-house staff on a WebEx with Turbonomiocs, although it is simple enough that you do not really need assistance with it.

The ROI would mainly be less time troubleshooting performance issues within the various virtual environments. Since we have a mixed environment, any issues that may impact performance appear on one dashboard, regardless of the environment. This saves the team a lot of time.

The pricing is fairly straightforward. It is based on the number of physical CPUs. There is now an option for per VM pricing. This can be valuable if you are monitoring VM's in a Cloud environment. 

No, but as mentioned before we did have vCOPS and chose this as a replacement.

I highly recommend this product, particularly if you have a heterogeneous virtual environment.

• Assure service performance
• Policy/automation
• Plan/capacity planning
• Application module
• Network module

Assure Service Performance: This feature is useful, because it gives us insightful information (similar to ESXTOP, but minus all the analysis) about a virtual machine (VM), whether it is over-provisioned or under-provisioned. The recommendations help us maintain a well-balanced virtual environment.

Policy/Automation: We set up a policy of automatically adding more vCPUs to the VMs based on Turbonomic's recommendation and continuous monitoring. This feature serves a dual-purpose for us: alleviate administrative tasks for our sysadmins and help maintain the highest performance in our VMs.

Plan: It is a great tool for capacity planning. It helps to eliminate all the guesses and gives us a good idea of the hardware specs we will need for future expansion.

Application/Network Module: Another great features that we use in our environment to help autoscale our application servers, so they are performing smoothly and fluidly with minimal intervention.

It would be helpful to have the option to display the target(s) by their host name instead of their IP address. Also, hopefully Turbonomic will continue to increase supports for more target types (vendors).

For me, a bit over a year. However, our team has been using it for years.

It has been a while, and I forgot. If there were any issues, they were probably very minimal. Otherwise, it was pretty straightforward.

Nothing so far.

No.

It has been excellent.

It has been excellent.

We were using both Veeam and VMTurbo at one point, but it was management's decision to go with VMTurbo.

It wasn't too complex.

Vendor team. They were knowledgeable and the deployment was pretty smooth.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Veeam.

There are three main areas that that we find priceless. The automation, planning/forecasting and reporting.

The reporting has allowed us to quickly evaluate our VM infrastructure and where we stand on a day to day basis. The planning/forcasting feature has allowed us to plan for additional hardware. At times, it has saved us lots of money when we did not need to purchase additional hardware even though we thought we would.

The new HTML5 version is not as user friendly as I had hoped.

We've had Turbonomic deployed for about 12 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, we forget it's even running, until we need to look at a report or have growth/expansion plans for our infrastructure.

No, we have not. Initially we used it for our Production Cluster but have recently expanded it to our SQL Cluster without issue.

They are fast, polite and knowledgable.

They are on par with customer service; fast, polite and knowledgable.

No, we did not use anything beforehand.

Straightforward with no issues.

implemented in-house.

It has saved us from buying lots of hardware that we would have bought if it weren't for Turbonomic. The planning/forcasting tool is the most valuable feature. This feature alone will pay for itself because it saves you from purchasing unneeded hardware in the first year alone.

The pricing is very competitive and much cheaper than VMware.

VMware Operations Manager.

Any company with a virtual infrastructure should have Turbonomic.