IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Automating the resource balancing. It let's us know when we need another host to keep things running smooth and fast.

It forced us to organize and standardize our storage environment - making smaller, generic datastores that had an unintended benefit of making the backups faster.

The interface could be a little cleaner and navigation a little easier. (note: this has improved in version upgrades since I first wrote this review!)

3 years.

No. We did have to clean up our storage before allowing it to make automatic decisions on storage commodities.

Never.

No.

The folks at Turbonomic love what they do and it shines through. I have never had a bad encounter with anyone there. They are very responsive to any needs we have and have even called to do a health check-up!

Excellent. I needed help one time upgrading to the latest version and installing our own branding and the tech walked me through both things in 10 minutes!

No. We looked at several and no one is in their league!

We had no problems and the installation folks were there just in case they were needed.

In-house.

You could take the number of hours per tech that no longer has to administer and babysit machines and resources, add the money saved by maximizing the hardware you have to its fullest potential, then add the labor saved in forecasting and the product pays for itself in the first year easily!

It is worth every penny you spend on it. Also, you can "deny" it from seeing hosts and environments that you don't want managed (ie DEV).

Yes. I remember Foglight being a long distant second.

I like to say "Set it and forget it". It has never made a bad decision. It obeys all rules you have in place in VMware. The reporting is fantastic and the forecasting has made the budgeting nightmare much easier in this area.

Like the rest of us, you will be hesitant to turn on "automagic" provisioning but you will be wondering why it took you so long to do so shortly after!

Automation and reporting.

Prior to using Operations Manager I spent a considerable amount of time evaluating VM placement. I found myself shuffling VMs between hosts on a regular basis. The automation feature of Operations Manager monitors performance and migrates VMs between hosts as needed. It has been saved me a considerable amount of time.

The product is administered using a web based interface. This interface was written in Adobe's Flash product which requires the Adobe Flash plugin to be installed on any device accessing it. Flash has had multiple security problems over the past several years and is a product I like to avoid. In addition, it's not available for mobile devices. Attempting to administer Turbonomic Operations Manager via a mobile device, like a phone or tablet, is impossible due to the Flash requirement. I would love to see this interface rewritten in HTML5. Someone from Turbonomic told me this was coming, but that was awhile ago and it still isn't here.

Over 3 years.

No. Working with Turbonomic is incredible. The company is probably the biggest reason I initially selected this product over a competitor. When requesting a trial Turbonomic arranges a meeting where they install the product in your environment and provide you with an overview of how it works. The product was deployed perfectly by a well Turbonomics employee who knew the product well.

I've been using the product for several years and have not encountered any problems relating to product bugs.

Excellent. I can't say enough about the quality of this company. For example, A few months ago our Turbonomic rep discovered I wasn't familiar with a specific feature of this product. He arranged a one to one phone appointment with a tech to teach me.

Excellent. I have only opened a relatively small number of support cases over the years I've used this product. Each case was handled quickly.

It was a simple deployment, but was done by a Turbonomic employee when our initial 30 day trial began.

Turbonomic performed the implementation. The initial setup was done fairly quickly by a very competent tech.

We looked briefly at VMware Operations Manager. We selected Turbonomic Operation Manager because of the features and level of support obtained from the company.

We have primarily used the automation features of the product to right size the VMs and migrate the VMs to best use the resources we have available.

It allows our small team manage a larger infrastructure because we can focus our efforts in other areas.

It does not fully understand our DR/SRM (active/standby) infrastructure as we have hosts with nothing on them. When running some reports the numbers are off.

5+ years

None.

Excellent.  They have gone out of their way to make sure we are happy with the product.  They have helped us make the system work for us, not against us.

Many free solutions over the years.  Needed something actively developed and reliable.

In-house deployment.

Foglight, VeeamOne, Solarwinds, Xangati

Having longer historical trending on resources has given us insight to our growth potential over the next few years.  This allows us to better budget our needs.

Dashboard. Quick way to monitor the vCenter.

Improve Overall efficiency dashboard has identified resource consumption by individual VM's either to much or not enough.

Tuning VM's to the correct resource consumption, memory or CPU, has provided a true snapshot of the environments "foot print". This has aided in the correct sizing of physical machines needed to support the environment.

Definitions/descriptions of what each chart means. The line graph looks good, but doesn't mean anything without prior knowledge of what a "good UI" number is for example. I have a server with host UI of 26.7, both desired and current. I guess that is good. I see the definition of what UI is, but I'm not sure what to do if I'm not running optimal. I let Turbonomic suggest, and optimize, but still have double digit UI.

2 years

I was told to use the Chrome or Firefox browser because it works better. I don't know if that has been fixed with the later versions of both Turbonomic and Internet Explorer. I still use Chrome to use this product.

None noted.

I rate customer service as a 10/10. I've not had any issues when dealing with support or sales team.

Technical support has aided me one time, and I am totally satisfied. Quick and correct resolution.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Tech support aided in the install, and then provided training. The install and setup is straightforward.

VMturbo support/presales team installed via remote desktop.

VMware Operations Manager.

The Turbonomic solution works/performs as advertised. It automatically removes a large workload in the day to day care of my virtual environment.

For us, the monitoring features, as well as the right-sizing recommendations and reports have been the most valuable.

It helps us stay on top of the health of our virtual infrastructure, make near-real-time decisions on how to fine-tune and adjust our infrastructure, and lets us be proactive in our approach.

The appliance interface doesn’t list the features/capabilities that licenses can be purchased for, so unless you were directly involved in the negotiations. Purchasing of the appliance, there is no way to tell what feature set you have. An example would be the network control module. There’s no way to tell, just from looking at the interface, whether or not that module is included/activated/licensed. It would be nice if the UI included a break-down of features that are both licensed as well as un-licensed. That way, you could not only see what you have, but what you don't.
Also, the right-sizing recommendations are great, but very little info is given about why the recommendation is being made. More info would not only increase understanding, but would help drive decision-making.

We have been using Turbonomic since 2013.

Deployment was nice and smooth.

None.

None.

The customer service folks have always been polite and professional.

On the few occasions that we've had to contact support, it's always been good. We haven't ever sat on hold for extended periods of time, and have always been satisfied with the abilities of the representatives.

We did not.

It was a standard OVA deployment with just a few configs to get set up.

We deployed in-house.

Turbonomic is a good value for the money, and they've always been fantastic to work with.

We did not eval other options, as there weren't that many to choose from, and Turbonomic was the most attractive.

Capacity planning

Auto load balance recommendations, always keeps our VMware cluster optimized.

GUI interface is not as slick as VMware.

Two years.

Very easy deployment, very light virtual appliance.

No issues.

No issues.

Excellent.

Excellent.

vCOPS, at the time vCOPS did not have auto load balance.

Straightforward.

Was able to do it myself with very little vendor help. Startup package is include with purchase.

Very affordable compared to VMware.

Yes, VMware was an option.

We looked to this product to help us to right-size our virtual machines and containers. Most people who request virtual machines tend to request more resources than they need, and most of the time it's hard to prove that they don't.

Our environment is entirely on-premises. We have virtual machines and Kubernetes running on some of those VMs. We also have plans to go to the cloud with some workloads in the future, so it's good to have this tool to help get the sizing just right when the time comes to pull the plug.

Turbonomic has been helping us use our resources more efficiently, the challenge we currently face internally is getting people to allow the servers to be turned off to make the changes recommended.

I also like the planning tool, which is helpful to make sure we have enough capacity for failing over one datacenter to the other in case of disaster, while still maximizing what we already have and helping to keep us from making host purchases we don't need yet. It's nice not having to make all those calculations on my own.

At the moment, I have only really had the opportunity to manage virtual machines with it.

We're starting to let it look at our Kubernetes workloads as well.

The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be. However, I haven't reached that point yet. That is the plan for the future though.

I really like the planning tool so I can make sure we have enough resources for upcoming projects that require servers, while still having enough resources for our disaster recovery failover needs.

The reporting feature could be made a little more seamless with the rest of the tool. It would be nice to be able to share and print the reports a little more easily.

Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI.

The upgrade process is a bit tedious, but I know the team is working on that.

The ability to set the scope at the dashboard level and let it flow down to all the widgets you add would be amazing. Having to select the scope per widget is a bit tedious.

We have been using Turbonomic for just under a year.

It is pretty stable, we have not had issues with that.

Turbonomic seems scalable to me.

Technical support is where Turbonomic shines.

Lots of features are still in the works but the company really makes sure you have a lot of attention and support after the sale, which is sometimes hard to get. Most of the time, once a vendor has your money, you never hear from them again. However, I have had a great experience with post-sales support and a lot of hand-holding.

It is really well done on their part to make their customer happy.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Deployed was completed in-house.

We have no ROI so far.

It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it.

We evaluated VMware vROps before selecting Turbonomic.

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.