IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Workload performance analysis.

We have been experiencing VM guest performance issues for months. We tried many things including adding more hardware to no avail. Within a week of running Turbonomic we were able to see clearly which guest systems needed to be resized and, especially, moved to other nodes within our clusters to obtain the optimal performance.

So far the application has been delivering as marketed. Once we can customize our dashboards to our liking, it will be much easier to identify where we need to focus on improving our infrastructure.

Two months.

None.

None.

None.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Dell Foglight.

Very straightforward, we were up and running in less than half an hour.

In-house.

Capacity planning as been most beneficial, as we are looking to upgrade our virtualization infrastructure and now we have a much clearer picture as to what hardware will be needed. I expect the ROI to be immediate as we save on hardware and virtualization license costs.

Licensing is easy to understand when you have an existing environment but determining growth or greenfield implementations may be difficult to get the right amount of licensing.

VMware vRealize.

Great product, can't wait to set to auto drive and let it do its magic.

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.

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!

We first pursued the product some years back for it's capacity planning tools but we find the continuous analysis the most useful. We can spin up new servers without a full understanding of workload values and then keep tabs on it and make adjustments as needed.

We found that if we didn't keep up with some incremental version updates, the required jump to the next version required a complete re-deploy from an image. That's avoidable by keeping up with the incremental updates.

4 years

None.

It's been very reliable.

Not applicable.

Excellent. We largely don't have to touch the product which has lead to us missing out on an occasional feature. Our rep has met with us from time to time specifically to go over things we might be missing. Very handy.

We've had excellent support including some help with getting the most out of the product. We tended to *need* a small portion of what the product can do. That can lead to missing out on neat things it *can* do, and our rep/support helped to point some of these things out for us.

No.

Initial spinup is simple from an image, with some configuration help from support at the time of implementation.

In house.

While our VM clusters are small anyway, it does let us optimize available resources at a per-VM level and keep the cluster small. We are fairly dense (VM:host ratio) and Turbonomic allows for this.

Reports on recommended right-sizing for VMs.

Getting the numerous VMs properly sized has saved a fair bit in hardware and licensing costs.

The UI needs to be finally and fully moved to pure HTML5 and NOT flash.

They are transitioning the UI to HTML5, but the GA release (as far as I know), is still in flash.

Two years.

No.

No.

No.

An eight out of 10

An eight out of 10

WhatsUp Gold, though it is not really the same thing.

Very straightforward.

In-house.

Seven months

vRealize, Foglight, VeeamOne

VMTurbo is unique in its approach to resource usage tracking and recommendations based on it. There is no other tool I have found that can do what it does the way it does it. Highly recommended.

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.

The planning and automation capabilities are great. Workload placement and right-sizing recommendations are best in the industry.

We are able to maintain a higher level of performance & efficiency in our virtual environment.

We would like to see Turbonomics dive into JVMs and continue to work with HP in the integration with HP OneView 3.0. This would provide a better overall picture of the physical infrastructure layer.

2 years

No issues. Support has been great in configuring specific requirements in our environment.

No

No

Excellent!

The setup is very straightforward. Deploy the VM from their OVA file and within 30 minutes you're up and running and ready to automate workload placement.

In-house implementation.

We have easily saved tens of thousands of dollars over the last 2 years by enabling right-sizing and automated workload placement.

Load the demo and see the recommendations. You'll be blown away by how over-provisioned your virtual machines are.

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.