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

The automation of vStorage migration, ability to create dashboards and the rightsizing recommendations. We also like the planning and forecasting features.

We have used the planning feature to retire ESXi hosts and move hosts from one datacenter to another. The planning feature told us how many ESXi hosts we needed to move based on the needed VM resources. We have also used the rightsizing recommendations on some VMs and plan on using it more extensively.

We have an instance of Turbonomic for our Azure environment that we're working with Turbonimic on. Many of the current recommendations are inaccurate. We've also experienced some issues with setting our storage up in Turbonomic with our "on prem" environment. In both instances, Turbonomic has been diligently working with us.

About six months.

Deployment for our on-prem solution was straightforward and easy to install. Our Azure deployment was not as easy, but I wasn't involved in that installation.

The platform has been stable during our involvement with it.

No.

We have had great experience with Turbonomic customer service.

We have had quick response for any technical support that was required. So far, I'm satisfied with the level of technical support.

No.

Straightforward. Upgrades are easy as well.

In-house, with assistance from Turbonomic.

We have been able to decommission some older hardware. We expect more ROI as we continue to right-size our environment.

I wasn't involved in the pricing or licensing.

No.

None at this time.

Provides automation of balancing workloads on ESXi hosts. With a fully automated environment, I never need to worry about host resource utilization or guest resource consumption. Guests are migrated between hosts and datastores to balance resource load. Resources on guests are automatically sized up and down as the demand increases or decreases.

The number one improvement is that Turbonomic gives me more free time in my day to address other concerns. I no longer have to worry about host and guest resource utilization, because it is all handled for me behind the scenes.

There is an area where new workloads can be created and placed. I've had trouble with that feature and find it easier to create new machines directly in vCenter and let it get the address by Turbonomic after the fact.

We have been using this solution for two years.

There were no issues with deployment. The deployment was exceptionally easy and support was readily available when I needed it.

There were no issues with scalability.

There were no issues with scalability.

I would give customer service a rating of 15/10!

Technical support has been exceptional.

There was no prior solution.

It was a very straightforward setup, as far as getting the product running. It got a little bit complex defining rules for my specific environment. For instance, "don't auto-resize machines whose name is like "nnnnnnn". Tweaking the rules to fit my odd needs was complex, but the support team breezed right through it for me.

Implementation was done by an in-house team.

This has not been calculated.

The pricing is transparent and straightforward. It is on a per-socket model.

We did not evaluate other options.

Turbonomic's best features for my needs are the autonomic scheduling, capacity planning, and right sizing capabilities. It is like VMware DRS and SDRS on steroids, predicting VM contention issues before they happen and migrating workloads accordingly.

I no longer have to worry about workload management, and when it comes time to plan for expansion it is no longer a hardware guessing game. Turbonomic can tell you exactly what hardware you will need based on the proposed workload. You can even input your own desired hardware configs to get more precise details on the report.

Turbonomic's current UI is coded in Flash though they have stated an HTML5 version is coming soon.

5 years.

No issues with deployment, however my original virtual appliance was so old that support had to forklift upgrade the database this year to their newer version so I could get the latest code. Was very simple and painless.

None.

None so far. My environment doesn't task the scalability meter though.

10/10

10/10

I previously looked at vCenter Operations Manager (previous name of vRealize Ops Manager) and it was not nearly as feature rich at Turbonomic at the time.

Not at all, deploy it, give it an IP or DHCP then connect to vCenter. 2-3 hours later you will start to see recommendations.

In-house, implemented it myself.

ROI on this tool was within 3 months. We had over-provisioned on the virtual and physical side after our previous upgrade to the VMware systems. Turbonomic brought our virtual infrastructure back down to size and saved us from upgrading hardware again for over a year.

They license by socket. Buy for the sockets you need.

They have a free version of the exact same appliance which just has features greyed out. Try it out and see what they can do for you for free straight from their website.

Turbonomic helps me maintain a lean operations team. What used to take half my day now is automated. ROI on this is a no-brainer.

We implemented this solution in our company and we also implement it for our clients. We use it because it connects to monitoring tools over APIs and if you have a monitoring solution, it removes data intelligently. Our aim is to optimize our customers' systems. The solution also offers insight into the financial impact of an event. We are partners with IBM which purchased Turbonomic earlier this year, and we are resellers of Turbonomic. I'm the company CEO/CIO. 

The help desk analyzes metrics events and Turbonomic tells you exactly what is wrong and how to resolve it. The solution improves the function of the help desk and saves time by making repairs quickly.

Optimization is a valuable feature. For example, if I have eASICs running and several VMwares running, it shows me how to optimize the system and get the best out of it. It reduces the cost of the two systems. I like that the solution integrates almost automatically with other products.

The solution could be improved by having all interfaces together and I'd really like to see more interfaces. 

I've been using this solution for two months. 

We haven't had any stability issues, the solution is running well.

Scalability is fine. We're using the product extensively with deployment of almost 54,000 systems. We receive a lot of alerts from those systems and do a lot of monitoring, so it's used constantly. 

The technical support is now done by IBM.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You execute an application or a script, depending on whether you're running it in Linux or Windows, and then you deploy the containers. It's pretty much one command and then everything is automatic. It took us about 20 minutes. 

We already had a good return in the first couple of weeks. 

Licensing costs are middle of the road; you need to take into account what the solution delivers to the customer. If it's running automatic remediation then it saves a lot of money for an organization. 

This tool is excellent for a CFO, while other tools are geared more towards a CIO. This tool has a different market. We're currently working in Europe, carrying out implementations in both Italy and Portugal, and we're starting on a new deployment project in Dubai next week. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Turbonomic provides insight and recommendations into our Azure cloud configurations designed to allow optimum efficiency and cost. By analyzing the load on demand, the product can sense when more resources are needed as well as when resources are being wasted. 

In the first month, we ran this as a POC. It saved us over 5k a month in costs by implementing its recommendations. The product continues to save us money but constantly updating its pricing files from Azure with current promotions and regional costs.

Its ability to scale up and down on demand allows for maximum cost efficiency. By dynamically analyzing our loads, the product can sense if resources need to be adjusted. It can also tell if another configuration of the same power would be cheaper in another region. 

• More Azure features are needed. They started with AWS and are now ramping up Azure features. 
• We would like to see more visibility into reserved instances in Azure.

Yes, Azure Advisor. It did not do a good job as regards memory utilization but concentrated more on processor consumption.

Make sure you do a POC first so you can see the benefit this product will bring.

Wonderful account team and support. Training is exceptionally thorough. 

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

The most valuable feature would have to be the out of box automation of VM placement. Without too much configuration, the dynamic and autonomous optimization provided by Turbonomic virtual machine placement is impressive.

With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past.

All eight of our vCentre clusters happily run hot at 90+% utilization with n+1 redundancy.

With over two and a half years of Turbonomic in operation, we are now using the planner functionality for an ongoing datacenter consolidation project. The accuracy of our initial planner results again have been impressive, and this will allow us to project investment costs in detail and with confidence.

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.

Including a four month pre-sales led PoC, Turbonomic has been in production just under three years.

Some minor reporting related issues with our initial production versions, which were promptly resolved by Turbonomic support.

No issues with stability, since we moved Turbonomic into production.

Again, we have not come across any issues here.

Customer service is very good and proactive, with the customer experience team keeping in touch regularly.

With only some minor issues, technical support for us has been very good.

SolarWinds Virtualisation Manager, more of a reporting engine, and lacking any preventive optimization functionality.

We moved to Turbonomic for its performance automation. The included reporting and alerting ability is a nice to have, but more or less obsolete.

The initial OVA based setup, including setting up one or two service accounts, took less than 20 minutes. I believe that our vSphere environment was discovered in less than an hour.

After registering for an extended trial license, the implementation was done by our in-house team under continuous support from Turbonomic consulting.

As part of the implementation, Turbonomic provided our business with detailed ROI projections based on our "live" Turbonomic data. By now, cost savings, by guided hardware consolidation and freeing up engineering resources, are very favorable, as projected.

What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training.

Yes, we ran a short trial of Dell Foglight for Virtualisation.