IBM Turbonomic Reviews

I'm using this solution to get performance stats outside of my vCenter environment.

I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around.

It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment.

It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines.

I've been using Turbonomic for about three years.

I haven't had a problem yet with an update. I've updated it three or four times over the last two years, and the machine has been stable. I haven't had any crashes. It has been doing as what's expected, and upgrades are pretty straightforward.

They do the upgrades quarterly, but I really haven't seen any bugs out of it that I would report back in. They're pretty sufficient at doing their beta testing before they release a major release. I usually wait about a month until they've released a major release.

It probably does have a lot of scalability. I'm a pretty small shop compared to some of the users who use this product, but I'm sure it scales out. From what I can tell, no matter how much I grew, it would still scale to my environment. Now, I can't speak about somebody who has 10,000 virtual machines out on the cloud and things of that nature, but it does allow me to facilitate cloud virtual machines outside of my environment if I had any.

I've had to deal with them probably mid-summer just with a couple of questions, and they were very responsive. I have no issues with them. I usually get a call back for assistance within an hour.

We really didn't have another product. We were licensed for vRealize, but we never actually spun it up, and then we saw Turbonomic. Our big reason for going for it was a lot of reporting functionality and the resource metrics that I can pull back to be able to bill customers. vRealize and Orchestrator are okay, but they don't have a lot of billing functionality in them to create reports and send automatically to end users or to do things of that nature. The management feature was nice, but the biggest reason for purchasing it was its ability to run reports and run billing outside of our VMware environment.

It was very straightforward. It was basically just an OVA appliance that I brought up, licensed, and then gave it permission to be able to talk to my vCenter. Boom, everything was out there and running. You could actually write custom reports in it and do things of that nature. Its setup was very easy.

There are only a couple of us who actually handle the updates. It is mostly used by my network administrators. There are about ten of us who actually use the tool to make adjustments in our VMware environment. It's pretty much just my VMware administrators who utilize the tool.

It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year.

I would recommend this product to others depending on what their need is and the size of their environment. I like what I've seen at this point, but it might not be the perfect fit for certain environments, but I would recommend it.

They constantly have quarterly webinars for their new releases, new functionality, and some of the new things they're doing. They do four major upgrades per year, but I probably use the tool to about 30% of its capacity. It probably has a lot more whistles and bells that I haven't even taken advantage of.

I would rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten.

Turbonomic keeps our cluster balanced and VMs running optimally. It shows us where in our environment that resources can be recovered as well as when extra is needed.

Monthly reporting is more detailed now and we can see where improvements can be made within the environment.

The ability to automate moving of VMs, Capacity Planning and Reporting have been invaluable to our monthly reporting.

None at the moment.  The product is improving with each release and the new HTML5 interface is great.  Would like to see the ability to move custom dashboards from the old interface to the new as that is not possible right now.

Three to five years.

Product has been very stable and updating works very well.

No issues with scalability as the VM when deployed is provisioned well for your environment.

Customer Service:

Customer Service/Sales I would rate as 10 out of 10. Sales was tremendous in helping me sell the solution to Management for purchasing.

Technical Support:

Technical Support has not been engaged as of yet.

Positive

Other solutions were evaluated during this time, but nothing was being used.

Setup is very straightforward and you have data within hours, not days or weeks.

It was implemented in-house by myself.

ROI will be approximately six months once we receive our license for the full product.

Contact Sales about pricing and licensing as they will work with you on the best solution.

Yes, other solutions were evaluated: vCOPS, Uila, and Opvizor.

The sales team was amazing in helping put together a slide deck for me to sell the solution to Management and also were able to negotiate pricing within our budget to help get us on-board.

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.

Turbonomic provides insight and recommendations into our Azure cloud configurations designed to allow optimum efficiency and cost. By analyzing the load on demand, the product can sense when more resources are needed as well as when resources are being wasted. 

In the first month, we ran this as a POC. It saved us over 5k a month in costs by implementing its recommendations. The product continues to save us money but constantly updating its pricing files from Azure with current promotions and regional costs.

Its ability to scale up and down on demand allows for maximum cost efficiency. By dynamically analyzing our loads, the product can sense if resources need to be adjusted. It can also tell if another configuration of the same power would be cheaper in another region. 

• More Azure features are needed. They started with AWS and are now ramping up Azure features. 
• We would like to see more visibility into reserved instances in Azure.

Yes, Azure Advisor. It did not do a good job as regards memory utilization but concentrated more on processor consumption.

Make sure you do a POC first so you can see the benefit this product will bring.

Wonderful account team and support. Training is exceptionally thorough. 

Resource Optimization: The system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications. This optimization results in better performance and less resources needed.

It has allowed our IT organization to keep investments in hardware flat for a projected three year period. In addition, we have seen a 30% performance improvement overall.

Automation: The ability to make changes, up or down, and move resources in order to ensure performance, making our investments last longer.

Enhanced executive reporting standard with the tool beyond the reports that can be created today. Something that can easily be used with upper management on a monthly or quarterly basis to show the impact to our environment.

• Improving the overall efficiency of the dashboard.
• Plan View
• Environmental Health Chart

We utilized the Plan View to understand our hardware requirements. When we replaced our old hardware with the new hardware in our datacenters, we were able to more accurately predict our needs, then with the old rule of thumb method.

We have two Turbonomic sites set up and use an aggregator to provide an overview of them. The biggest suggestion that I could make is for the changes in the aggregator to be imported into the Turbonomic sites. Currently, we make the change at one site, then the second site keeps our environment on an equal basis.

We have used Turbonomic for over two and a half years.

No, there have never been any issues in deployment.

Early on in our PoC, we encountered issues, where some of our VMGuests failed to have their information log correctly. That was a number of versions ago and we have not experienced the issue since.

The only issue we have had with scalability is that the sites are not integrated into the aggregator. We need to update each site individually and cannot export or import the changes, and need to do double duty to maintain a level playing field in multiple environments.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

A vendor team who was excellent.

Turbonomic has provided us an automagic optimization of our environment from an operational point of view. I am not sure if we could have as easily setup the same functionality from vROps or on such a granular level.

• 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?

Reporting and the dashboard.

Turbonomic provides weekly and monthly reporting functions to our operations. This gave insight to management on how our virtual environment is doing in terms of efficiency and capacity.

GUI can be more user friendly. We are also looking for certain reports but they are not defined yet.

One and a half years.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

Customer Service:

Not at this time. The team usually is very responsive.

Technical Support:

Very good.

We used a VMware native tool before and it is impossible to get any capacity and efficiency data from it. We had to hire a consultant to give us some data. But were able to replace all that once Turbonomic was installed.

It is pretty straightforward.

In-house team with help from the Turbonomic technical team

Organization is not there.

Turbonomic new pricing seem to be more expensive, but not sure.

There were quite a few solutions presented from EMC, Cisco, and others.

Automation is a good goal but we can't get there until the organization is ready.