IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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 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.

Resource Load Balancing

Right-sizing recommendations

Capacity Planning

We no longer have to constantly manually manage host utilization to keep some hosts from running much 'hotter' than others.

UI is still maturing. The UI is relatively easy to use but still does not have that professional look to it.

3 years

No.

No

Not thus far.

On a scale of 1-10, 9.5.

On a scale of 1-10, 9.

We had used the built in VMware products, they did not do as good of a job of balancing as Turbonomoic.

Very straightforward. Deploy the virtual appliance and set up vCenter connections. Creating the policies takes a little explaining but just for understanding. Once you understand what exactly you are setting up, very easy.

In-house.

Automation of tasks to keep the resources loads on my ESX servers balanced. The reporting functions also save me a lot of leg work when requests are made from those higher up about over environment performance and trends.

It keeps resources loads balanced with in my ESX clusters. Also the information about scaling up or scaling down machines is very useful as I am able to properly increase or decrease resources for virtual machines. We are more efficient and once again the reporting allows us to get pertinent data quickly.

There are a lot preconfigured reports that can be ran within Turbonomics for some of the more common information needed. To do a custom report you have to create a SQL Query string and add it as a report to gather custom information. It would be nice to have the ability to choose the contents of the reports from within the web portal as opposed to getting one from the user community or writing it yourself.

Personally, close to a year, but my company has been utilizing it for around 2 years.

No, and the upgrade process was also very easy.

Not scaling out at this point.

Account reps have been great and very engaging.

Need for technical support has been minimal.

No.

It was originally deployed before my employment, but I did do redeployment and the process was very simple.

In house.

The most common features we use are the reports for VM performance and the planning tools. We use the planning tools to right-size hardware purchases when replacing old hardware. It takes the guess work out of switching hardware platforms.

It has reduced our hardware costs by allowing us to purchase only the necessary resources instead of over purchasing out of caution.

The automated resize of VMs requires caution. Make sure you properly configure this feature before it is enabled.

It's been a while. About five years.

No.

No.

No.

Wonderful. They have strong technical support that is very willing to dig into problems.

Wonderful. They have strong technical support that is very willing to dig into problems.

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.

We've been able to balance our environment with much more automated ease than was previously possible.

They could do with a little less UI clutter.

3 years.

None.

None.

Turbonomic is fantastic at scalability! It has great built in tools to plan scaling.

5/5 stars, Turbonomic representatives are always available and friendly!

5/5 stars, representatives have always been able to rapidly address any technical concern and get any changes up and running when we need them!

Very straightforward, we were able to easily import the VMWare appliance to our environment.

• Plan what-if scenarios
• Reporting
• Real-time evaluation and recommendation of guests

We have been able to use the planning feature to consolidate VMs on few hosts and have been able to show savings of several hundred thousands.

• More insight into the OS and processes rolled into the dashboard natively.
• Add a way to pull metrics from physical servers.

Two years.

No issues experienced.

No stability issues.

The appliance has been able to handle our environment with speedy interface response.

Very proactive in engaging customer for feedback.

I have had no issues in this area.

Yes. The previous solution was used to monitor both physical and virtual environments in one solution. As we became highly virtualized the real-time monitoring and decision-making became important and Turbonomic had an edge over the previous vendor.

Very straightforward. The only downside was we lost history of prior performance.

In-house.

One year.

There are several tiers. Implement the basics, build confidence, and add more as needed.

Yes, vROps.

We are very pleased with how Turbonomic is working out in our environment.