Turbonomic (VMTurbo), once it is set up and running, works behind the scenes to run the VMs as efficiently as possible based on the available resources.
Turbonomic, per its design, finds bottlenecks and, depending on how it is configured, recommends actions and takes action to resolve the bottlenecks. Bottlenecks could be related to RAM, CPU, disk IO, etc.
Instead of buying more RAM for ESX hosts, Turbonomic managed the VMs in a more efficient way than DRS. The software makes recommendations of increasing the number of ESX hosts.
After our ESX lease was up and we purchased new hardware with more RAM, we continue to use Turbonomic in our development and UAT lane. I expect to use this product when using the cloud as the cost of CPU and RAM in the cloud will be prohibitive.
Turbonomic is not easy to use out of the box. It took a two-day session with an on-site tech to get up to speed.
The product's economics terminology is initially foreign to a system administrator.
There are many options in this application and if the admin is not using the app frequently it is easy to forget.
Customer Service:
Customer service was pretty responsive.
Technical Support:
Technical support was pretty responsive. Issues that could not be immediately resolved were escalated to Engineering/development.
We got help from an on-site tech to perform the install.
I have to agree about the planning tool as that is what helped me sell the solution to our Management in November. We are now using it and planning VM additions takes all but 5-10 minutes versus the manual spreadsheet method of 4-5 days.