IBM Turbonomic Reviews

We have found the automation for moving VMs optimally to be much better than VMware DRS. We have also rebalanced our storage platform using the recommended storage moves. This has improved performance and capacity use across hosts and storage.

Cluster Capacity Dashboards have been a huge benefit towards capacity planning and scaleout reviews

The planner element of the product is fantastic for host replacement planning and allowing the rightsizing of our disaster recovery (DR) provisioning.

We now have a more robust capacity request process within the department, and over the past 18 months, we have put on hold a scale out of physical hosts at both our primary datacenter and DR. This has saved the trust 1000s in new hosts and more than paid for the solution many times over.

The planner can be complex to complete.

Three years.

No issues.

No issues.

No issues.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager was our previous product. This solution was slow, overly complex and its impact limited in terms of what it was capable of doing.

Very straightforward and the technical team walked us through all we needed to configure.

In-house, as it was very straightforward.

This year, we have probably saved around £24,000 on new host scaleouts.

We pay a subscription model, which more than pays for itself each year.

Yes, we used SolarWinds Virtualization Manager.

As a manager of a large complex critical healthcare infrastructure, this product has been a huge benefit to me and my team. It is the go to solution for troubleshooting and decision-making regarding our VMware-based datacenters.

Assure Service Performance.

Right-sizing and right-balancing VMs and hosts used to be an ongoing, tedious, and time consuming effort. With Turbonomic, it does that work for me so I can focus my attention on other priorities.

Interface and navigation can be a challenge if you do not spend a lot of time with it. Creating policies is a bit intimidating and clunky, but that may be on me, because I have not spent much time in the deep end. To Turbonomic's credit, it does what I need it to do with minimal involvement or attention on my part. I am aware that its capabilities are much greater than what I am taking advantage of.

Since April 2013.

Deployment could not have be easier.

There were a couple issues with some upgrades, but support is excellent, and any issues were resolved by very skilled techs. Because of the nature of the appliance, there was no effect on my production environment.

No.

Excellent. I am noticing quality support seems to be getting harder to come by. Turbonomic's support quality is what all support organizations should aspire to achieve.

The previous "solution" was mostly just guess-work in evaluating vCenter metrics.

Initial setup was very straightforward. At least getting the appliance up and running and connected to vCenter. Fortunately, support was excellent and provided some hand-holding in the initial configuration, and it has been pretty much set-it-and-forget-it since.

In-house, with the help of support for configuration.

Not quantified.

VMware Operations Manager. Like most things VMware, it is too pricey.

• Visibility of all workloads, whether on-premise or Azure environments.
• Control of workloads to assure performance and deliver service levels.
• Enforcement of compliance policies across a hybrid cloud.

We have the best practices recommendations to optimize our virtual machine (VM) environment.

• The arithmetic of optimizing the resources of VMs based on the workload.
• Some of workload are by a monthly basis. Need to consider the month-end or quarterly-end workload.

More than three years.

No.

No.

No.

Very cool.

Very cool. We got an online demo from the technical support and much assistance in operations.

Veeam MP for VMware with SCOM 2012 R2.

We are still using this solution as our major monitoring system.

It was simple.

Not sure.

No advice.

Veeam MP for VMware.

The resource monitoring and usage reporting have helped keep the VMware clusters balanced and running smoothly. It also helps rightsizing over-provisioned virtual machines (VMs) for resource reclamation.

We are over 75% virtual, so the importance of our virtual environment stability and performance are vital. Turbonomic has been excellent in keeping us running smoothly.

Maybe a few more canned reports. In addition, the ability to create custom views to get to VMs that may require more babysitting for resource usage instead of having to drill down every time.

Five years.

None.

No problems.

None.

Excellent, they are always willing to help.

Excellent and ready to train.

vCOPs, for only 30 days. We thought Turbonomic was much easier to get to important, useful data.

Yes, it was a simple setup.

Over the phone assistance with internal staff. It was great. There were no problems.

It helps us keep resources balanced, available, and plan for future purchases.

It is fair.

vCOPS.

It works great. I definitely recommend it.

• 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.

With this platform we have automated our virtualization management and we are providing performance to our Apps when they needs it and saving CAPEX/ OPEX.

we only do investments in new hardwarie when the life cycle is ending or when Turbonomic have been a right sizing.

CAPEX and Management / sizing (OPEX).

We implemented Turbonomic this in March 2016.

We have mix of virtualization infrastructure. We have Hyper-V 2012 R2, vSphere 5.1 / 5.5 and 6.p, XenServer 6.02 / 7.0. Only with Hyper-V we have had a little issue for Windows Server configuration.

We have issues only when we upgrade the product, example in 5.7 we have issues with HyperV and VMM.

No issues.

7

9/10

SCOM and vRealize.

Within two weeks we were collecting metrics and watching how it was working. In a month is enough to do right recommendation for Turbonomic.

we Didn't implement with a vendor. We did alone only with Turbonomic support. It was very easy this deploy

In 9 months.

There is a balance of pricing between others software.

We used vRealize but it only works with VMware and that only works with thresholds. We didn't save the OPEX and we didn't solve the issues.

With Turbonomic Operations Manager automated all environment virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V, vSphere, XenServer) with one unique management console. We save our CAPEX working with a plan inside of Operations Manager when we change hardware by lifecycle or when we have new projects, we have a capacity planning with that.

The biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center. VMTurbo distributes all of my VMs equally across all of my hosts. I don't ever have to think about when a host is in more heavy use if there's going to be constrain on that single host that it lives on, because it rearranges everything for me through VMotion control.

The big benefits for me is a lot of time savings. I don't have to care and feed for each individual VM, and make sure that the environment's balanced just the right way. Also, I'm able to see which of my applications are taking more cycles, more compute cycles and RAM usage. I really can understand my environment a little bit better.

The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like.

One of the reasons we went with VMTurbo was because we wanted to replace vCOPS. We weren't getting the level of granularity and alerting out of vCOPS to really understand our individual VMs, but VMTurbo, I think, could do a little bit better job on reporting. I would love to use them in our monthly metrics meetings to really show in a very nice graphical way how our environment's growing, how many VMs did we grow from one month to the next. They have some reporting features that we could have a little bit better for us.

VMTurbo has been very stable for us. I can't actually recall an instance where it's crashed on us. We have rebooted it, and it comes right back up, and continues right where we left off, and continues to manage our infrastructure.

We started out with VMTurbo in our development and test data center managing over 400 virtual machines. The same instance now manages our entire production data center with our SaaS platform that all of our customers connect to. I didn't have to change anything. The virtual appliance handled it without breaking a sweat.

I had a question that came up, and I didn't know how to do something which was how to get very detailed application load on a particular server. I called in to the support, talked to the support gentleman, and he helped me get to the bottom of it. We actually even leveraged their development resources. He got them on the call with me, and so I was able to easily and quickly talk to tier III or even development support directly as a customer.

We have some specific instances come up where vCOPS was making recommendations on something like a SQL server. It said, "Hey, you only need 12 megabytes of RAM or 100 megabytes of RAM for the SQL server." Even old OS's just can't run with that low amount of memory. VMTurbo when we looked at it, we understood that it was going to make better recommendations. So far, that's been the case. We've been able to fully automate the distribution of our VMs among our hosts, where vCOPS and DRS really weren't doing the right job for us. They were creating imbalanced hosts. Some hosts would get overloaded, and we've ran into big problems.

It was very easy because it's a virtual appliance. We were able to download it into our network, connect it to vSphere, and within a few minutes of scanning our environment, it was able to plug in and connect to all of our VMs, and manage them for us.

I was still having to babysit a lot of the VMotion requirements for my environment. I was having to move things around manually. VMTurbo has promised, and the promise they delivered on was no more manual VMotions for eight months. That's been a huge time saver for me, and I can trust it to take care of my environment.

Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced. We also were able to get additional modules that helped us with our specific needs without much more costs.

Actually no. We were looking for a specific need, and I really hadn't seen anybody else out there besides what vCOPS said they could do to deliver automatic load balancing of virtual machines as well as right sizing VMs automatically, and I don't know anybody else out there doing that same thing.

I would say if you have a VMware environment that you are having to spend almost any time load balancing and VMotioning your machines, you're going to need VMTurbo. If you have constrained resources, if you have a limited budget on how many hosts you can buy, you're going to need something like VMTurbo to make sure that the applications that need CPU and RAM are getting it, and the ones that don't are resized so that you can get those resources back.

In reviewing it, we really like to get hands on. We engaged a lot of times through the VMware user group. We get sponsors out to those meetings. We can talk to them face to face. We also talked to our co-members, and find out what they're using and see what kind of results they've had. We've only heard nothing but good things from VMTurbo.

Turbonomic does a great job of handling things like:

• Load balancing in VMware clusters
• Giving insights into how VMs are being utilized resource-wise
• Giving insights into how virtualized applications are running inside of VMs
• Offering suggestions (and that can be automated) to adjust clusters, host hypervisors, and VMs for the best performance

It has saved us a lot of time in keeping our vSphere clusters running smoothly.

We have used this solution for four to five years.

This is one of the areas that Turbonomic shines. Any issues we have with the product are handled quickly. Turbonomic has a great and knowledgeable support staff. There are no first-tier database reading techs here. (You know what I'm talking about!)

Technical support is very professional, efficient, and knowledgeable.

The setup was straightforward. Understanding how the application works in our environment and how to set up rules for different clusters, however, took a little longer. Turbonomic has great training materials on their web site and a really good user forum. They have a top-notch support and engineering team.