IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Provides automation of cluster resource management.

This has saved us a great deal of expenses by better balancing workloads across ESXi hosts. This allowed for higher VM densities.

Reports: Have a wider variety of canned reports ready to go.

We have been using this for three years.

We had a couple of minor version bugs, but support was excellent and quick to address these.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer service is excellent and very proactive.

Technical support is excellent and very proactive.

The setup was straightforward and quick.

The implementation was done in-house with assistance from Turbonomic's engineers.

We achieved an ROI in less than three months.

The pricing was very reasonable.

We considered VMware Operations Manager.

It is an excellent product backed by a fantastic team of technical and customer service staff.

The ability to monitor and automate both the right-sizing of VMs as well as to automate the vMotion of VMs across ESXi hosts to insure that all resources are being utilized at peak efficiency.

We no longer have to continuously monitor our virtual environment through multiple interfaces (WhatsUp Gold, Veeam ONE, vSphere, etc.) to discover issues impairing performance. We now receive three separate reports every morning, one showing any actions that Turbonomic attempted to make which failed that lets us know what we need to look at; one showing recommended actions which we have designated within Turbonomic to be manually performed; and one showing all datastore utilization over 85%. All from a single product and all visible from a single pane of glass. With the capacity planning feature, it allows us to accurately determine the proper sizing for our replacement hosts while projecting for a rate of growth specified by us.

Mostly the dashboard. 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. With the newest version, the dashboard has gotten even more "intimidating", at least to me.

Approximately one year.

Deployment was extremely easy and straightforward. When setting up custom automation rules, a member of Turbonomic's support team initiated a WebEx and reviewed all of the rules looking for any errors as well as suggesting some additional custom rules based on how we wanted Turbonomic to operate. That's one of the great things about Turbonomic, it is almost endlessly customizable so you can configure it to work in your environment as opposed having to tailor your environment to work with the tool.

No issues at all.

None.

The customer service of Turbonomic has been excellent.

Technical support have been very good.

We previously used a combination of Veeam ONE and WhatsUp Gold to monitor our virtual environment. We switched due to Turbonomic's automation ability. Its ability to monitor and manage practically all virtualization technologies (Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix XenServer, and with the release of version 5.9, most public cloud platforms as well), and the ability to see everything from a single pane of glass.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Implementation was performed through an in-house team with Turbonomic staff available for WebEx for assistance.

In precise dollar amounts, unknown. Having said that, Turbonomic has freed up our staff to devote more time to project implementation and expansion, as opposed to manually monitoring our environment.

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.

We didn't evaluate other options. We were already using other monitoring tools and switched from them to Turbonomic.

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 in the form of virtual machine migrations in VMware vCenter.

Automation, policies, and reports have made a lot of previously manual work now either more efficient or completely automated.

I would like to see the new HTML5 web interface released soon. In using the preview, it looks very promising.

Three years.

No issues.

We did have an issue certain build causing the database to fill up however technical support was very helpful in getting updated to a newer version to correct this issue.

No issues.

Excellent. All my interactions have been timely and efficient.

Excellent. All my interactions have been timely and efficient.

It was very straightforward. The OVA file was simply imported into vSphere and turned. Following that it was just a matter of a few simple networking configurations.

In-house.

I do not have access to specific figures however I do see a definite return in the form of administrator time.

None.

Turbonomic is very unique and lends many strengths to further augment my virtual infrastructure.

• After implementation and turning on the VMTurbo DRS in automated mode we recognized better and balanced performance on hosts and VM's.
• We use the reports and reclaimed a lot of wasted storage.

There are fewer tickets about VM performance problems.

3 Years

No. It comes as a virtual appliance which is installed and configured quickly. The update process to a newer version or patch level is simple.

No, very stable.

No issues with scalability.

Excellent

The support team at VMTurbo is so quick in responding. I always get an answer to my questions and they always get me the support I need when I need it. I’ve been very impressed.

We use other Monitoring Tools but not with these automation features.

It comes as a virtual appliance which is installed and configured (IP Settings / vCenter connection) quickly. Around half an hour and you are ready to use it. Some hours later the first recommendations come up.

In-house

Another aspect of being a VMTurbo customer is being a member of the Green Circle Community, an online community for innovators, virtualization experts and forward thinking IT professionals who engage with one another and share their experiences.

I’ve been involved since the beginning of the Green Circle,and it’s been such a great platform to engage with and help others.

The community is so diverse, and you know that what you read is true.

• The dashboard, reporting and planning. The dashboard being so customizable makes it very powerful for myself and other team members as it is able to be scoped to whatever the team needs.
• With numerous teams focusing on their own area, it makes it a breeze to set their dashboard to what they want to see, whether it be DBAs, storage or unix team, application owners, they each get their own view into their environment.
• The new reporting function is amazing. Anything you see on the screen, be it dashboard or drilling down to the individual virtual machine, with a click of a button, you can get a report on it.
• The planning feature is amazing as it can help with rolling out mass VMs for say, like a VDI rollout. It helps you determine what the load would be if you add xx amount of VMs.

It gives us a quick look into what the environment is doing, down to the individual application, on the fly. We can find misbehaving VMs very quickly and to see what is related to it, be it storage or network.

The UI could be a little more user friendly and less buggy. When working heavily in VMTurbo, you need to occasionally log out and back in to the site as flash will have problems.

About two and a half years.

None at all. Very quick and easy to roll out. We are mostly a Hyper-V shop and downloading a new appliance and setup is fast and very quick.

The appliance is pretty stable, which is to be expected since it runs under Linux.

With any application like this, the more information it holds, the slower it could take. We have roughly 80 hosts and about 3500 VMs in it and it might take some time to complete a full discovery, but it is negligible considering the importance of the data.

10!! One of the things that sets VMTurbo apart from other vendors is the feeling of family. They truly want to help get any issue resolved as soon as possible. Their customer service is directly related to their product. You can tell right away that the techs, engineers and sales people care about the software.

10/10.

We used Microsoft's Operations Manager in tandem with this application. VMTurbo has a lower learning curve on use and setup.

The initial setup is very straightforward. When you get into the actual configuration for your specific environment, it is recommended to have one of the VMTurbo folks on the phone to walk you through some of the intricacies of the software.

This was installed in-house.

ROI is difficult for us to gauge as we are non-profit and specifics are not really tracked.

We have only used Microsoft Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager, neither was set up to give us the in-depth look that VMTurbo was designed to do out of the box.

Whether you have a single, specific virtualization technology or a multi-platform environment, you need this software if you want to see end to end in your environment.

Dashboards for critical servers. When there is an issue, we can get to critical data quickly. Much faster than using vCenter.

We are able to focus in on the actual problem faster.

I have found the interface not to be intuitive. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future.

About one year.

No.

No.

No.

Excellent.

Excellent.

No.

Yes.

In-house implementation.

I can't say. I am an engineer, not in management.

n/a

n/a

Go with it!

Starting from the reporting and recommendations, every feature has been very helpful. Even when we decided to not fully automate it, now we have a lot more visibility into what is happening, on a single pane of glass.

We use the tool to properly size the virtual servers and get a lot of resources back, while reducing the Ready time, so that was like winning twice.

I would like to have a report to see all the snapshots.

About a year now.

No issues at all. That was the goal since the first call: please don't bring me something else to manage that will take forever to be in place. Thirty minutes on the phone and the tool was working.

No.

No.

Excellent.

Great too. Didn't go to anybody who didn't knew what was doing. Sometimes when you call to support, you get that feeling that the guy is not following you or does not have a clue what you're asking for. That never happens with their support.

No tool before.

Very straightforward. Thirty minutes on the phone and the tool was working.

In-house.

Not calculated yet, but definitively positive, since we recoup a lot of resources.

They are very flexible on how to make it happen.

No.

Great tool, easy to recommend.