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IBM Turbonomic vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic
Ranking in Cloud Management
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
205
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (5th), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st)
VMware Cloud Director
Ranking in Cloud Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Cloud Management category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 6.1%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Cloud Director is 7.7%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

AD
Aug 1, 2023
Helps us optimize costs and allocate resources, but we need PaaS component optimization
The platform is continually updated with new features. If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers be more satisfied with the updates and push them into their environments. Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase. If they could provide those enhancements, that would be really great. For example, we are spending a lot of time on Azure Databricks, exploring it and trying to do cost optimization as well as setting up the policies. If Turbonomic could help us understand how much the Databricks CPU is using per instance or workspace, that would help us optimize it, scale it according to our business requirements, and decrease costs.
MB
Jan 25, 2024
Efficient infrastructure management that offers comprehensive cloud management capabilities, including multi-tenancy, self-service provisioning and integration with VMware technologies
Over the past two years, VMware transitioned from vSphere 6.3 to 2016, which presented challenges for us. The migration from VTT was particularly difficult, prompting us to reconsider the solution's architecture. VMware occasionally makes decisions that impact customers and alter workflow, necessitating adjustments to features and processes. It would be beneficial if VMware maintained greater backward compatibility in their technology upgrades, ensuring smoother transitions and minimizing disruptions for users. It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security. While such options exist, they are inadequately documented, requiring experimentation with uncertain outcomes. We seek clearer documentation and smoother integration processes to minimize risks and ensure functionality when incorporating third-party solutions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts."
"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.'"
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"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."
"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."
"We like that Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action. It provides us a map of resource utilization as part of its recommendation. We evaluate and compare that to what we think would be appropriate from a human perspective to that what Turbonomic is doing, then take the best action going forward."
"We can run it on self-hosted systems, and we are happy with the stability of vCloud Director."
"We like the basic operations that we can do with the VM such as restarting, rebooting, creating snapshots, and deleting snapshots."
"The most valuable features of the vCloud Director are global management, added services, and automation."
"Key enhancements include better synchronization with vCenter and increased reliability, ensuring stability during extensive usage and various actions."
"vCloud Director works and makes my life easier. Its self-service capabilities allow us to give resources to our customers. They can spin up as many or as few machines as they like, and it works."
"The most valuable feature of vCloud Director is virtualization."
"The initial installation and setup are very quick."
"I like the functionality that's available with Orchestrator. The platform stability stuff that I would be involved in worries me from the automation side because you have a lot less hands-on control of things. Price point, it kind of puts us off."
 

Cons

"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."
"The old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"We don't use Turbonomic for FinOps and part of the reason is its cost reporting. The reporting could be much more robust and, if that were the case, I could pitch it for FinOps."
"Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing."
"They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date."
"I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"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."
"I had issues with the support, but I also learned from the support. There is room for improvement in the response time."
"It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions."
"If you use it for a lot of customers, it is too heavy for this solution."
"Initially, the setup was complex."
"The solution requires a lot of hardware and resources for cloud deployment than other competitors. Additionally, the performance could improve."
"There are some shortcomings. There are bugs with opening support."
"The product could use a billing feature so we can automate billing for clients."
"In version 6.7, compatibility to migrate VMs from a vCenter to vCloud Director had a problem. However, this has been solved in the newest version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."
"Everybody tells me the pricing is high. But the ROIs are great."
"The pricing is in line with the other solutions that we have. It's not a bargain software, nor is it overly expensive."
"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."
"It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it."
"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."
"I have not seen Turbonomic's new pricing since IBM purchased it. When we were looking at it in my previous company before IBM's purchase, it was compatible with other tools."
"The license could be less expensive and we are on a perpetual license."
"I believe the pricing is reasonable."
"If one means a very bad price, and ten means a very good price, I rate the price as a five on a scale of one to ten."
"I recommend using the Enterprise or Enterprise Plus licenses because they unlock all of the solution's capabilities."
"We are paying around $ 15,000 per month for vCloud Director, and it would be nice if it could be made cheaper."
"It's a costly product. The licenses may not be costly, but with every new development in their product, we need to purchase deployment services, and the deployment services are quite costly."
"It enables us to provision new clients more quickly."
"vCloud Director is an expensive solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

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...
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a single thing comes to mind when I think of improvements and that is integration. In...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few years ago, my organization was using another cloud management tool. We switched...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For example: Your DevOps team is supported through Infrastructure as Code services w...
 

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager
vCloud Director
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Turbonomic vs. VMware Cloud Director and other solutions. Updated: September 2024.
800,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.