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IBM Turbonomic vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 13, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (5th)
SolarWinds Virtualization M...
Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 12.9%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is 9.1%, up from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtualization Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Keldric Emery - PeerSpot reviewer
Saves time and costs while reducing performance degradation
It's been a very good solution. The reporting has been very, very valuable as, with a very large environment, it's very hard to get your hands on the environment. Turbonomic does that work for you and really shows you where some of the cost savings can be done. It also helps you with the reporting side. Me being able to see that this machine hasn't been used for a very long time, or seeing that a machine is overused and that it might need more RAM or CPU, et cetera, helps me understand my infrastructure. The cost savings are drastic in the cloud feature in Azure and in AWS. In some of those other areas, I'm able to see what we're using, what we're not using, and how we can change to better fit what we have. It gives us the ability for applications and teams to see the hardware and how it's being used versus how they've been told it's being used. The reporting really helps with that. It shows which application is really using how many resources or the least amount of resources. Some of the gaps between an infrastructure person like myself and an application are filled. It allows us to come to terms by seeing the raw data. This aspect is very important. In the past, it was me saying "I don't think that this application is using that many resources" or "I think this needs more resources." I now have concrete evidence as well as reporting and some different analytics that I can show. It gives me the evidence that I would need to show my application owners proof of what I'm talking about. In terms of the downtime, meantime, and resolution that Turbonomic has been able to show in reports, it has given me an idea of things before things happen. That is important as I would really like to see a machine that needs resources, and get resources to it before we have a problem where we have contention and aspects of that nature. It's been helpful in that regard. Turbonomic has helped us understand where performance risks exist. Turbonomic looks at my environment and at the servers and even at the different hosts and how they're handling traffic and the number of machines that are on them. I can analyze it and it can show me which server or which host needs resources, CPU, or RAM. Even in Azure, in the cloud, I'm able to see which resources are not being used to full capacity and understand where I could scale down some in order to save cost. It is very, very helpful in assessing performance risk by navigating underlying causes and actions. The reason why it's helpful is because if there's a machine that's overrunning the CPU, I can run reports every week to get an idea of machines that would need CPU, RAM, or additional resources. Those resources could be added by Turbonomic - not so much by me - on a scheduled basis. I personally don't have to do it. It actually gives me a little bit of my life back. It helps me to get resources added without me physically having to touch each and every resource myself. Turbonomic has helped to reduce performance degradation in the same way as it's able to see the resources and see what it needs and add them before a problem occurs. It follows the trends. It sees the trends of what's happening and it's able to add or take away those resources. For example, we discuss when we need to do certain disaster recovery tests. Over the years, Turbo will be able to see, for example, around this time of year that certain people ramp up certain resources in an environment, and then it will add the resources as required. Another time of year, it will realize these resources are not being used as much, and it takes those resources away. In this way, it saves money and time while letting us know where we are. We've saved a great deal of time using this product when I consider how I'd have to multiply myself and people like me who would have to add resources to devices or take resources away. We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time. Those saved hours are across months, not years. I would consider the number of resources that Turbonomic is adding and taking away and the placement (if I had to do it all myself) would end up being hundreds of hours monthly that would be added without the help of Turbonomic. It helps us to meet SLAs mainly due to the fact that we're able to keep the servers going and to keep the servers in an environment, to keep them to where (if we need to add resources) we can add them at any given time. It will keep our SLAs where they need to be. If we were to have downtime due to the fact that we had to add resources or take resources away and it was an emergency, then that would prevent us from meeting our SLAs. We also use it to monitor Azure and to monitor our machines in terms of the resources that are out there and the cost involved. In a lot of cases, it does a better job of giving us cost information than Azure itself does. We're able to see the cost per machine. We're able to see the unattached volume and storage that we are paying for. It gives us a great level of insight. Turbonomic gives us the time to be able to focus on innovation and ongoing modernization. Some of the tasks that it does are tasks that I would not necessarily have to do. It's very helpful in that I know that the resources are there where they need to be and it gives me an idea of what changes need to be made or what suggestions it's making. Even if I don't take them, I'm able to get a good idea of some best practices through Turbonomic. One of the ways that Turbonomic does to help bring new resources to market is that we are now able to see the resources (or at least monitor the resources) before they get out to the general public within our environment. We saw immediate value from the product in the test environment. We set it up in a small test environment and we started with just placement and we could tell that the placement was being handled more efficiently than what VMware was doing. There was value for us in placement alone. Then, after we left the placement, we began to look at the resources and there were resources. We immediately began to see a change in the environment. It has made the application and performance better, mainly due to the fact that we are able to give resources and take resources away based on what the need is. Our expenses, definitely, have been in a better place based on the savings that we've been able to make in the cloud and on-prem. Turbonomic has been very helpful in that regard. We've been able to see the savings easily based on the reports in Turbonomic. That, and just seeing the machines that are not being used to capacity allows us to set everything up so it runs a bit more efficiently.
Ravi Khanchandani - PeerSpot reviewer
Optimizing virtual environments by reclaiming and allocating resources efficiently
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization. It provides me with recommendations for resource allocation, indicating if a virtual machine is under-provisioned or over-provisioned. This allows me to reclaim resources, such as reducing the number of CPU cores or RAM, which is beneficial. Its capacity planning feature is also very useful for me. The GUI is highly simplified, cutting across various virtualization platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix environments.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get."
"We've saved hundreds of hours. Most of the time those hours would have to be after hours as well, which are more valuable to me as that's my personal time."
"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 system automatically sizes and moves resources based on the needs of the applications."
"We can manage multiple environments using a single pane of glass, which is something that I really like."
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"In our organization, optimizing application performance is a continuous process that is beyond human scale. We would not be able to do the number of actions that Turbonomic takes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It is humanly impossible with the little micro adjustments that it can make. That is a huge differentiator. If you just figure each action could take anywhere very conservatively from five to 10 minutes to act upon, then you multiply that out by thousands of actions every month, it is easily something where you could say, "I am saving a couple of FTEs.""
"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."
 

Cons

"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"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."
"Recovering resources when they're not needed is not as optimized as it could be."
"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 as well."
"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."
"There is room for improvement [with] upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."
"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."
"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I consider the pricing to be high."
"What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"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."
"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."
"When we have expanded our licensing, it has always been easy to make an ROI-based decision. So, it's reasonably priced. We would like to have it cheaper, but we get more benefit from it than we pay for it. At the end of the day, that's all you can hope for."
"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."
"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."
"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Energy/Utilities Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?
It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The ...
What needs improvement with Turbonomic?
The implementation could be enhanced.
What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?
We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single d...
What do you like most about SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
This solution delivers significant cost savings, especially from a capacity perspective. Consistent monitoring is essential in a virtualization environment, and Virtualization Manager, or VMAN as i...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?
SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems.
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
SolarWinds VMAN
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
Elliot Health System
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.