IBM Turbonomic Reviews

• Automating migrations and implementing storage recommendations
• Reporting
• Planning tool

It has increased the utilization of our hosts without sacrificing performance. We can run more VMs over a longer period of time without needing to purchase additional hardware. The Plan tool is great as you can create a plan and save it for the future. It allows you to configure the plan however you need it to determine what is needed. For example, I use the Plan tool for capacity planning throughout the year, where it used to be a manual process. I now have plans that I can run and within minutes; the report will let me know what we need and where.

I no longer need to keep a watchful eye on the environment. Turbonomic provides assured performance. Anything that we don't yet have automated, it will make a recommendation to improve the performance of that particular server.

There is a lot of information and to get a plan or report correct is a little trial and error. Once you get used to the interface and how it works, it does get easier.

For about four years

None. It's very easy to implement. Deploy the OVA, connect to your environment(s), configure your custom settings particular to your company, and your done.

I've never encountered issues with stability. We did need to increase the memory on the appliance because we have a very large environment.

None.

Their customer service is second to none. Any time I've had to contact support, they've answered it immediately and correctly.

Excellent!

At a previous place of employment we used vFoglight which was just a terrible product. Turbonomic doesn't even compare because it doesn't monitor your environment and send alerts. It prevents alerts from ever happening.

Very straightforward.

I implemented it myself.

It was within 12 months of deployment. It would have been sooner had we been able to enable all recommendations.

N\A

N\A

Capacity reporting features.

This product has allowed us to see how dense we can make our ESXi clusters.

Reporting on powered down VMs.

Six months.

No.

Yes.

No.

10 out of 10.

On a scale of one to 10 it's been a 5.

No.

Straightforward. Deploy an OVA.

Vendor team, good level of expertise.

Capacity planning, migration planning, consolidation of our environment.

Speak with your account manager.

Yes, vROps.

N/A

I'm primarily using Turbo for rightsizing VMs and to prove to application owners that the software vendor's system requirements for reserving huge amounts of resources aren't necessary.

With VMware's DRS aggressiveness turned down and allowing Turbo to manage the load, we now have a perfectly balanced load across our clustered hosts. These could otherwise easily be off by as much as 30-40%, even on the very aggressive settings in VMware before Turbo.

The reporting module has very big potential, but really lacks predefined reports for all kinds of purposes. I often find that the report I need doesn't exist, even though I know the data for it is available.

One and a half years.

No issues. Even upgraded to the new CentOS appliance and went through backup and restore of the database without any issues along the way.

No.

It's best used in a clustered environment, and a bit cumbersome to maneuver around in when installed in a single host environment.

Excellent!

Excellent!

I have had several WebEx sessions where their techs very professionally addressed some questions or issues I had.

It has saved us from purchasing new hardware in four regional offices and had us extend the service for two years, instead of buying new servers (HPE Gen8 and Gen9 servers running on fifth year). It has easily returned the investment we made in purchasing Turbo.

Migration planning, VM rightsIzing reports, performance assurance dashboards, workload placement rules and planning.

Helps us rightsize workloads, highlight bottlenecks and effectively plan for capacity.

Can't wait for the new GUI (which is due soon) as the old interface can be difficult to navigate.

Two years.

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

Really good, all the account management I've spoken to understand their product and how we can improve and progress our environment.

Also really good. All the support staff I've spoken to understand their product and what we're trying to achieve.

No.

Very striaghtforward.

In-house.

No exact figure, but the aim is to extend the lifespan of our hypervisor host before adding capacity.

In order to get the most out of the product cost, you need to drive the rightsizing of workloads. Trust in what it recommends.

No.

Nope.

Not having to dig through any event logs, alerts or performance logs within the vSphere clients and instead getting direct recommendations from Turbonomic is wonderful.

While none of our VMs are highly transactional, good performance 24/7 is needed in the healthcare realm. Turbonomic gives us insight and assurance that we are meeting operational targets.

The old interface looks a bit dated and the new one does not seem to have all the information the old one has (which is why I use the old one). It can take me a bit of searching to find the endpoint I want to analyze further.

Also, more/better alerts would be useful, e.g. when action is warranted where automatic operations have not been enabled.

Two years.

None.

When upgrading prior versions, I sometimes lost prior performance data. Even support was not able to retrieve it. It was not that critical at the time, but frustrating nonetheless. That being said, recent updates have not resulted in any data loss.

No.

Customer service is very good and the wait times are minimal.

Technical support is very good and the wait times are minimal.

No.

Initial setup is as easy as you would want. Simply deploy the OVA and point it to vCenter.

Implemented on my own.

I cannot quantify ROI at this time, but can attest to the many hours saved in virtual maintenance and the number of times we've been able to conclusively show optimal performance under given environments.

It's by no means a cheap product, but worth the investment.

We had been using VMware's ESXi Enterprise Plus with all of its features, including DRS and HA. Turbonomic simply fit the bill when we looked at it.

No.

Automation of leveling out compute power across servers and forecasting.

I would simplify the navigation, this would be a great read-only tool to give to upper management.

One year.

Not a single hiccup.

It eats memory but a simple reboot fixes that.

No.

Nine out of 10.

Nine out of 10.

Only native VMware solutions.

Very simple.

In-house.

Not 100% sure.

I do not.

No, this was provided to me.

The support team is outstanding!

The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs.

We have been able to recover significant headroom by utilizing Turbonomic's measurements. Moreover, there is no need for any in-house reporting to check capacity.

Turbonomic's product is the best I have seen at calculating headroom when compared with our original in-house calculations. However, the current versions do not split out headroom by component nor do they indicate where the capacity bottleneck lies (e.g. CPU, memory, or storage).

We have been using this product for close to a year now.

Deployment was very smooth and we are not even using the appliance. We are using the application on RHEL 7.

I have yet to encounter any problems with stability.

We have multiple vCenters so we did have to break out our initial Turbonomic implementation into multiple Turbonomic instances.

Their customer service is very responsive and they have been following up with us since we bought the product.

I get accurate answers quickly. I would have to rate it higher than most support organizations.

We were using an in-house toolset. There were primarily two reasons for the change:

1. Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development.
2. Use a product that is recognized in the industry to increase transparency and confidence in our capacity calculations.

Very simple. If you can run "yum" and follow a one-page document you can install this product.

We implemented with an in-house team after a week of onsite training at Turbonomic's office.

The break-even point is probably after less than a year. We calculate we will continue to save money year over year by using this product; even more so as we start implementing more features.

You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm.

I have used and tried other products before. Turbonomic is the best for two main reasons: Simplicity and accuracy.

Many products provide tons of information. It's impressive, but superfluous. Turbonomic provides you the information you need - and can provide more - but the dashboards are simple and easy to understand.

Planning and workload placement.

Planning infrastructure needs for our virtual environment was previously a tedious task that included a lot of guesswork. With Turbonomic we can now precisely model future workload and infrastructure supply to plan for growth.

The UI can be slow and occasionally hangs, requiring logging out and back in. More informative progress status when working with plans would be helpful.

Four months.

None.

Minor issues when removing targets from the application, requiring reboot of the Turbonomic virtual appliance.

None.

Customer service has been superb. Our account team has been available to guide us through deployment and configuration of the tool. They've helped us understand how to use Plan and Policy to forecast and organize workloads.

N/A: I have not had to work with technical support yet. My colleague who has though, reports that they have been helpful and responsive.

No other solution deployed previously.

Setup was simple and fast.

The vendor has been very helpful in getting the software installed and configured. They are extremely knowledgeable and professional.

Automation and planning. Turbonomic's ability to automatically load balance my storage and hosts has saved a lot of time. Planning for a future VDI deployment has allowed us to eliminate the need to scramble for resources during the deploy.

It has balanced the load on the hosts during the day to eliminate bottlenecks.

The user interface has room for improvement, but it is well on its way with the new UI that is being developed.

We have had it for over two years now.

Deployment was easy. It was done over an hour long conference call. Had tangible data in place several hours after that.

Had one issue on an early release (first several months of owning Turbonomic), when Turbonomic made a suggestion to resize itself and it changed a few other settings upon a reboot. Since then, no issues.

No. Have yet to have a need to change the number of hosts in our environment. We have had to replace some older hosts per Turbonomic's suggestion.

Excellent. We talk to our account rep on a regular basis and he walks through our environment and offers other areas for automation as well as new features being added.

Excellent. For the very few issues we have had, they have been quick to respond and solve the issue.

We did not have a previous solution that monitored everything. It was all done manually via the vCenter Server. When we purchased Turbonomic (VMturbo at the time), vRealize Operations was just getting going and it was outrageous. Turbonomic offered everything we thought we needed, and even things we didn't know we needed, at a great price.

Very easy. Deploy an OVF template, some minor out-of-the-box configuration, and it is up and going.

We purchased direct, and implementation was done via a WebEx.

Hard to put an exact dollar amount on it, but it did eliminate the need for us to add an additional person in our department as it automated most of the work in our VMware environment.

Just license what you want to monitor. We have a DR environment which we chose not to monitor.

We checked out vROPs and a Veeam solution, but they just didn't cut it.

Workload Placement and Capacity Planning.

We have used Turbonomic to help correct performance issues with applications in our business.

A more interactive dashboard with integrated features.

Two years.

No issues with deployment or upgrades.

No stability issues at all.

None.

Customer service is excellent.

Excellent.

We used vCOPS. Turbonomic is a more user friendly and informative product.

Setup was very straightforward and tons easier than the other products we have used in the past.

In-house team only.

We have saved money on licensing and availability of our applications.

This will help you realize where your money is spent.

vCOPS.

I would definitely recommend evaluating this product before making a purchase. It was well worth the purchase.