IBM Turbonomic Reviews

The primary reason we initially got it was to help us to right-size all of our VMs, to make sure that they were the appropriate size for the amount that they were being used. That was the biggest push to get this, and we implemented it. 

We have also discovered that Turbonomic can automatically suspend virtual machines that were on a schedule. For example, in the afternoons and the evenings when a VM wasn't going to be used, it could just be shut down, so that we wouldn't be charged eight to 10 hours of compute time, per machine, that wasn't going to be used at all during that time. That's been pretty useful. 

We're also using it to help us determine the reserved instances that we need. We haven't purchased the reserved instances yet but we're using Turbonomic's suggested reserved instance purchasing algorithms to assist us in finding the right balance for the number of RIs that we want to purchase.

It has provided us with a pretty good deal of savings on the front-end, helping us to correctly size VMs that were over-provisioned. We were paying a lot for VMs that really didn't need to be as big as they were. There has been a pretty drastic decrease in compute and cloud spends, due to either making the changes suggested by Turbonomic, or letting Turbonomic make the changes. That, coupled with using the suspend functionality to suspend machines that are not being used, pulled down our cloud spend a good bit.

The solution also provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation. When you check in daily, it does evaluations on where your VMs and your infrastructure stand on that day. As a VM starts becoming more utilized, it will let you know to start planning on upgrading the machine because it's starting to show some extra usage that may grow beyond its capacity.

The right-sizing is the most valuable feature. It constantly lets you know if a machine is being over-utilized or under-utilized, so that you can make it the appropriate size for what you need it for.

It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, "This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level." It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, "Apply these resizes," and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you.

The way they evaluate reserved instances could use some polishing. The people that make decisions on what to buy are a bit confused by how it's laid out. I don't know if that's the fault of Turbonomic, or if that's just the complexity of reserved instances that Microsoft has created. It's not really that confusing for me, but for some people it's a little bit confusing. Trying to explain it to them is a bit tricky as well. We get to a point of impasse where we just accept that they don't really fully understand it, and that I can't fully explain it either. It would help if Turbonomic could simplify it or clarify it, and help non-technical people to understand what's going on and how the reserve instances are being calculated and what they apply to.

We've been using Turbonomic for about two-and-a-half years.

The stability is good. We've never had any issues with the server running and doing what it's supposed to do. It's never crashed. I've never had an issue bringing up the user interface. Nothing has ever caused any issues.

I think it would scale very well. Our size is in the medium range, but based on the way I see it working, I don't think it matters what size your cloud infrastructure would be. I think it would handle it very well.

In our company, Turbonomic is monitoring pretty much all of our machines in the Azure cloud. If they're in AWS, those are not managed. That's a separate side of the house and they don't want to have their stuff managed by Turbonomic. But we use it to manage everything from size to suspending, for all of our Azure-based machines.

As we move forward, we'll be using it more. We're going to look into using the suspension feature to suspend more VM. As we start getting comfortable with reserved instances, we'll probably use it to help us gauge how many reserved instances we need to buy.

I had to use their technical support when I set up the suspensions process. They were good. They did a good job. They got back with me fairly quickly and they were able to walk me through the process of how to configure it. They took the time to explain it very well. They even walked me through the process to make sure I understood how it works. As simple as a suspend of a VM might seem to be, initially, when you look at how it works in Turbonomic, it's not super-simple.

We didn't have a solution in place at all.

I was working for the company when they implemented Turbonomic but I wasn't part of the project that implemented it. I have since taken over one of the primary roles in utilizing it and we've deployed an updated version of it. I have a co-manager who uses it as well, on the same level as me. We back each other up on it.

That's something where there is room for improvement: upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions.

Maybe there's a way that they can go and retrieve those specific bits of data, but so far I haven't seen how that happens. I would like to see them make major version upgrades work, first of all, because you can't currently upgrade to a major version. You have to deploy it to a new server. But at the very least, if we have to deploy it to a new server, give us a way to pull in that lifetime savings information, and track the information they've built up. We've had the same one for almost two years and it would be nice to keep all that tracking information for future reference.

I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive. 

It would be great if the price of the solution would scale with the amount of money that you are saving in the cloud. If the solution itself cost, say, $300,000 over the course of three years, it should be saving you $750,000 in cloud spend. They should make it worth it. At this point, I don't think there's any built-in tool to show you if the price that you're paying for Turbonomic is worth the cost savings that you're getting from it.

Or maybe the licensing and pricing could be done in tiers. If you had 100 virtual machines in the cloud, they would sell you licensing for 100 machines, and then 500, and then 1000. It would help if they did it in tiers so that you're not paying a massive amount of money for Turbonomic as a whole, and not saving as much as you were hoping.

I don't think Turbonomic provides you with a single platform that manages the full application stack. It manages a lot of the infrastructure stuff, Layer 1 through Layer 3 of the OSI model. It's mostly focused on infrastructure and making sure your infrastructure isn't over-provisioned. I wouldn't say it could all the way through the application.

Optimizing application performance on a continuous process is beyond the scope of a human to be able to do on a consistent basis. In other words, if you have 20 virtual machines, it's reasonable that a human could watch the utilization and determine size changes as needed, but if you're getting into hundreds of virtual machines, it becomes a task that's beyond the ability of a person to do by himself. It's a question of scale. As you get into hundreds of VMs, it becomes too tedious to keep track of and it becomes very time-consuming as well. Having said that, we don't use Turbonomic for that. We don't use it to manage any applications. We only use it to manage virtual machines.

We have only just started using containers. We haven't gotten into letting Turbonomic manage those containers. That's the only other thing that we would probably use it for at this point: managing the containerization. We use it right now for just cloud. We're pretty solid on on-prem because we've been doing a lot of migration of our on-prem stuff to the cloud. So we actually have a lot of compute resources available on-prem and we're not really worried about running into any resource issues.

Before Turbonomic, there was no person or group of people managing those aspects of our environment that it manages for us, but if there had been then, obviously, it would have reflected time savings at this point.

We're using it for placement automation. Turbonomic will look at the virtual machines that are on different hosts and it will say, "Hey, three are too many machines on this host. And this host doesn't have a lot of machines on it." It will place the virtual machines in a balanced way on different hosts and try to balance the hosts out as best it can.

We're also using it for CPU and RAM addition and automation: Do we need to add more memory or take away memory in the environment or look at a machine to see if it is being used to the best capacity?

We also use Turbonomic for planning. It takes a look at our environment and we can make plans, like if we want to put some of our environment into a cloud-based system, like Azure, it will tell us our costing.

We use it for about 4,000 machines.

Performance is something that should constantly be monitored and constantly be worked on. Turbonomic is doing that in the background, without me having to manually do it. It's a great help. It's monitoring something that I just physically couldn't do all by myself because the environment is too large. It's looking at the resources in any environment and taking snapshots of where things are. At the right time, it's adding or taking away resources, and that's helping make the environment more efficient.

Planning is another way it really helps because it gives us an idea of the cost to move. We wanted to move everything to the cloud. It helps us to figure out what it would look like and how Turbonomic could even help, if we want to do that. But more importantly, it gives us an idea of how much it would cost. We get a round figure of the cost involved.

It handles virtualization, cloud, on-premise, and storage for us. We're moving towards it handling applications. The solution understands the resource relationships at each of these layers and the risks to performance for each. It understands them and makes adjustments based on what's needed. It also lets us know, if we need to make some adjustments, where they are. It definitely does a good job with that. It's not only knowing where to put things, but it's doing it for us.

We use it for implementing scheduling of actions for change windows. We do that based on our service-level agreements. We have to have a certain level of uptime. We do things because of our change process and the way that we have systems going. It's best for us to do it at a scheduled time, when everybody knows that the system will be going through some type of change.

It helps us meet SLAs by making sure that the machine has the resources it needs to function properly. Also, when it does make changes, it does it during the SLA windows.

We also use Turbonomic to show application metrics and estimate the impact of taking a suggested action. We have it doing that based on things in clusters. We'll set something up in the cluster and then have it see if that cluster is being utilized to its fullest or if it's being over-utilized. It gives us visibility.

In addition, it helps optimize cloud operations and reduce our cloud costs. We're putting things on a certain type of storage and moving things to best fit our environment and give us the best cost for our environment. It will also give us an idea, before we put it there, of what the cost will be before we move it to Azure.

It saves me a lot of time because I don't have to do things to monitor the environment to see what machines need RAM or memory or need CPU taken away or added. It can do that for me. I would estimate it saves me 20 hours per month.

The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps.

It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. If a machine needs more resources, it will use the automation policies to add resources so that machines get the resources that they need. And if they don't need them anymore, it will take them away.

It provides everything in one screen, one area. I'm able to see not only the planning, and not just the stuff that's on-premise, but things that are in the cloud. I can even narrow down to different applications. It does a lot in one pane. That was really important because we didn't have to go to three or four different products to find what Turbonomic had in one product. It really helps that Turbonomic is showing you efficiencies and the best way to keep things in the environment working properly, instead of me, or even me and co-worker, trying to do it. We just know that it's handling it better.

You can monitor an application and all the hosts and virtual machines that are connected to the application and it will give you an idea of how many resources it is using and what it is using. It also lets you know if it's over-utilized or under-utilized. It helps us to know if we're in an area where a machine might not perform the way we are expecting it to, because of the resources that it has or the resources it needs to have.

The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines.

I've been using Turbonomic for about one year.

It's very stable and works the way that it should.

It seems scalable, although I haven't scaled it up or taken anything away yet. We plan to use more storage. We're not using as much storage as we would like.

The support has been really good. The people that I've been working with have been really helpful. It's been working.

We used vRA from VMware. 

The initial setup of Turbonomic was straightforward. I worked with somebody from Turbonomic and we got an understanding of the environment and we worked together to get it installed and to get the placement working first. After the placement, we worked on changing and automating the addition of CPUs and RAM.

Something we need to do is make the solution aware of business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources. We need to make it aware of what's critical. We do that by setting up clusters and then setting certain policies on what is in each cluster. We separate critical things through clusters.

Within 15 minutes of deploying the virtual appliance, we had some valuable data about our environment and starting using the recommendations for VM resizing and moves within the 32 blade cluster. After about a month of following the recommendations, we found we trusted Turbonomic enough to start automating the resizing and moves. Recently, we've even used it to vacate an entire storage array onto a new one for about 1800 VMs. Everything worked flawlessly without a hiccup.

It has essentially replaced the need for 2-3 operations personnel managing requests for RAM/CPU resizing for VDIs. 

Would still like the ability to pick tiers of performance for workstations. For instance, would like to create a group wherein workstations could only scale between 4-8GB RAM, 8-16GB, 16-32GB, etc. This would fall inline with VMWare's Horizon Air performance tiers. 

We've been using Turbonomic almost 18 months now. 

Very simple to deploy, less than 20 minutes before we could start seeing data and recommendations on our environment. 

Certain versions have had glitches in the past but they've usually been fixed or patched within a matter of days. One such instance was RAM scaling over 160GB on certain VMs for no apparent reason. 

10/10. They've been quick to respond each time we need help with a new feature or we notice something odd. 

Turbonomic essentially pays for itself in the first 30 days of use. Can completely replace an operations team for maintaining a healthy environment. 

We don't use the full functionality of Turbonomic because our company is subject to regulations around making those changes. Some of that functionality would require going through a change process. We've been using it more for heuristics and analysis on the right-sizing of our VMs and VMware.

At the resource level, Turbonomic has enabled us to right-size our converged infrastructure to a more appropriate level. Instead of using 12, we can use 10. It has been really good in helping us size the environment for our compute.

Another benefit is that it has helped reduce performance degradation. That happens at the application layer sometimes, and then a reset happens and everything is fine again. I would estimate it reduces performance degradation by 10 percent.

It has helped us streamline a lot of those applications. We're leveraging faster configurations on our VMs. Those systems that are being virtualized are operating with better peak performance whenever it's required, and that's what Turbonomic really does. It gives us insight into those peaks and valleys that we tend to go through.

The solution has also reduced resource congestion and starvation. For us, it's always a matter of refreshes. I like the forecasting tool that Turbonomic has where you punch in what you have today and it assesses the history of that setup. Then you can say, "I want to replace it with a snazzy, new compute/storage component," and it will provide a recommendation. That is a very good forecasting tool.

A lot of the features in Turbonomic are valuable. The placement features are really good, allocating the load of VMs between systems within a VMware cluster. The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature.

It also offers hot-memory increases, whenever they're applicable.

In addition, it gives us visibility and analytics into our environment, to a limited point. It does SQL components and, likely, in the newer versions, it has more of that layer. But, we're using it at the VMware level. We have tie-ins to our Pure Storage, and we're using it for discovery of that, as well as of our Cisco UCS for compute. It does delve down into the infrastructure level, if you allow it to do so.

Those analytics are important for understanding, historically, what sort of load a system handles over a certain period of time. If you have a system that is running efficiently and fine, but there is a year-end or month-end or quarterly-end report that needs to run, Turbonomic allows us to anticipate our requirements. For example, when those reports come up, it might be one of those times when we need to bump up the memory and CPU for that cycle. Turbonomic is very good for that aspect, from the standpoint of productivity. It does a lot of recommendations for placement, although we don't enable that in our environment because it's controlled. But it has a lot of good features.

Before IBM bought Turbonomic we had already been using it for four years.

The stability has been pretty good. 

One thing of note is that we did go through an upgrade from one Turbonomic appliance to a newer version and, unfortunately, a policy that was created and that was meant to be kept disabled, was transferred over and enabled. That wreaked havoc on our VMware landscape. It started making changes to servers, such as memory-up and memory-down changes, and that caused a big kerfuffle.

Before IBM bought it, the support was fantastic. After IBM bought it, the support became very disappointing. 

When Turbonomic was under its own flag, they would hold our hands every step of the way. That included everything from proactive upgrades to the appliance, to recommendations, and best fits for us.

When IBM bought it, we renewed the product for one more year. When I had a license that had expired, I was having such difficulty doing anything on their portal or getting support on the product. Ever since IBM took it over, it doesn't look like we have been getting the support we used to under Turbonomic.

Negative

We did not have a previous solution.

I'm the one who deployed the virtual appliance, connected it to our vCenter, and did the add-ons for Pure Storage and Dell storage. The setup, back then, was pretty straightforward. The complexity came in when we started having to use policies and rules. That's where we got a lot of help from Turbonomic.

The full deployment from end to end, with policies, took just over a couple of weeks. We have under 10 users of the product.

I did the deployment of the appliance by myself while the configuration of the group policies and rules was done with Turbonomic's assistance. There were two of us from my company who were focused on the deployment and we had two or three individuals on it from Turbonomic.

I consider the pricing to be high.

We looked at one or two other solutions, but those would probably have been renamed or rebranded since then, just like Turbonomic.

My advice would be to come up with an agreement, in writing, that support on the product will have quarterly touch-point meetings to discuss what's new, what has changed, and what upgrades there are. Those quarterly touchpoints would be an ask, for me, if I had to buy the product again. For the initial deployment, I would recommend some sort of professional services engagement from IBM, just to make sure that you're utilizing it to its best potential.

If you're looking into Turbonomic but already have a process for optimizing your environment and for monitoring, I would suggest doing a comparison between what you have today and what Turbonomic can do. Do a like-for-like on the functions you use today and ask if Turbonomic does the same and whether it does it better. Also, you need to look into the licensing model. Be ready with those questions. You want to make sure Turbonomic will be a suitable replacement and not fall short because your current tool does more.

In terms of understanding when a performance risk exists, the solution does help to a certain point. It says "increase," or "decrease." But it doesn't give explicit information as to why. It doesn't say, "This system has been running hot for X number of days or weeks." Those kinds of details aren't there. It just provides a recommendation.

I would rate the potential of Turbonomic as a seven out of 10. I love the fact that there is slight automation, if you let it do that automation, and the whole forecasting piece is really good. It's a pretty good solution.

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single dashboard, allowing us to identify opportunities to improve their current spending.

It can consolidate and amalgamate all the efforts. Before using it, we had multiple reports, tools, and sources of information that we needed to consolidate. With IBM Turbonomic, we can operate everything in a single console and view everything in a unified way. This allows us to address key performance issues and spending concerns that we identify, optimizing our operations to work better for our customers and us.

The overall price, the dashboards, and the FinOps capabilities are important features. The ability to manage all the budgets is also crucial.

The implementation could be enhanced.

I have been using IBM Turbonomic as an integrator for the past year.

50 users are using this solution. As an integrator, we're constantly looking for new logs and trying to make some of our customers for whom we do not provide cloud services part of that new ecosystem.

Initially, it can be tricky as you have to configure everything. The setup requires a significant level of effort. If there were a way to migrate or import some features or have some preconfigured settings, it would greatly help with the initial setup. It takes three to four months as per standard operation.

We have engineers who are certified in the tools. We have a couple of product managers, but the main source of disruption, or at least delays, is the integration and dependency on other areas. For example, if we want to integrate the CMDB with the monitoring tools we already have in place for each of our different customers, it requires time and dependencies not only on the availability of people but also on the ability to make changes to the environments.

The ROI is very good. Although it's expensive, you can fully implement the recommendations from the various tools and dashboards and easily recover the investment within the first year.

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The cost will vary depending on the specific scenario, but it is not cheap.

You can easily maintain it once you get into a stable mode with IBM Turbonomic. The operations team that adopted the tool is getting a lot of value from it, making it easier for them to manage and consolidate their work. It doesn't ramp up your AppDV or resource needs but helps improve and optimize them. We are using fewer people now.

It has a lot of capabilities. We haven't encountered any scalability issues. The way we have implemented it has helped us easily incorporate new customer sets.

There weren't many people with the skills to implement and manage IBM Turbonomic, so we had to develop the team's expertise. However, once we overcame that hurdle, managing it became easier.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We typically use it for optimizing the performance and resource allocation of virtual machines.

It offers visibility and analytics for monitoring performance across our environment, starting from the application layer and extending down the stack to the underlying infrastructure resources. Specifically, it concentrates on optimizing memory and CPU resources as part of our focus on hardware and environment optimization, without delving into additional aspects.

There was a single project where it helped us reduce the size of hundreds of VMs. This represents the only example with which I am familiar.

It's important to note that optimizing the monitoring of our private cloud is not the primary function of this tool. It is specifically utilized for optimization purposes. We employ it for tasks such as trending predictions and VM utilization performance. However, for monitoring, we rely on a completely different tool.

It has resulted in cost savings, specifically at the infrastructure layer.

The primary features we have focused on are reporting and optimization.

I have been working with it for more than five years.

It has proven to be highly stable.

I haven't directly interacted with tech support, but based on what I've heard, the overall experience was satisfactory.

Maintenance is necessary, and one person is sufficient for the task.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Provides automation of the workloads to the best hosts and trending of resource capacity over time. We constantly focus on this as a service provider.

We have a relatively small team for these tasks. We want to ensure that we have automation to provide our clients with the best experience, as well as reducing our overall labor. These factors are critical to our success.

The user interface is quite dated. There is a new UI release on the horizon and some of the new UI elements are in the newest version. It would also be good to have an overview of the environment of improvements. In addition, VMtools out of date, as are the phantom files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were no deployment issues.

There were no stability issues.

No scalability issues,so far and we have 20 hosts.

I would give customer service a rating of 9/10.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

We used vMan from SolarWinds. We wanted a product that enabled more automation of tasks and intelligent load balancing.

The setup was straightforward. You simply install the OVA, set the IP, and plug it into your Vcenter.

We did the implementation in-house.

We have been seeing a 4-6 month time window where we have been able to extend before procurement of additional hosts which have been required.

Alongside the additional labor, we save approximately $4500/month.

Ensure that you do a multi-year agreement to get the best discounts.

We looked at vMan and vROps.

I'm using this solution to get performance stats outside of my vCenter environment.

I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around.

It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment.

It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines.

I've been using Turbonomic for about three years.

I haven't had a problem yet with an update. I've updated it three or four times over the last two years, and the machine has been stable. I haven't had any crashes. It has been doing as what's expected, and upgrades are pretty straightforward.

They do the upgrades quarterly, but I really haven't seen any bugs out of it that I would report back in. They're pretty sufficient at doing their beta testing before they release a major release. I usually wait about a month until they've released a major release.

It probably does have a lot of scalability. I'm a pretty small shop compared to some of the users who use this product, but I'm sure it scales out. From what I can tell, no matter how much I grew, it would still scale to my environment. Now, I can't speak about somebody who has 10,000 virtual machines out on the cloud and things of that nature, but it does allow me to facilitate cloud virtual machines outside of my environment if I had any.

I've had to deal with them probably mid-summer just with a couple of questions, and they were very responsive. I have no issues with them. I usually get a call back for assistance within an hour.

We really didn't have another product. We were licensed for vRealize, but we never actually spun it up, and then we saw Turbonomic. Our big reason for going for it was a lot of reporting functionality and the resource metrics that I can pull back to be able to bill customers. vRealize and Orchestrator are okay, but they don't have a lot of billing functionality in them to create reports and send automatically to end users or to do things of that nature. The management feature was nice, but the biggest reason for purchasing it was its ability to run reports and run billing outside of our VMware environment.

It was very straightforward. It was basically just an OVA appliance that I brought up, licensed, and then gave it permission to be able to talk to my vCenter. Boom, everything was out there and running. You could actually write custom reports in it and do things of that nature. Its setup was very easy.

There are only a couple of us who actually handle the updates. It is mostly used by my network administrators. There are about ten of us who actually use the tool to make adjustments in our VMware environment. It's pretty much just my VMware administrators who utilize the tool.

It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year.

I would recommend this product to others depending on what their need is and the size of their environment. I like what I've seen at this point, but it might not be the perfect fit for certain environments, but I would recommend it.

They constantly have quarterly webinars for their new releases, new functionality, and some of the new things they're doing. They do four major upgrades per year, but I probably use the tool to about 30% of its capacity. It probably has a lot more whistles and bells that I haven't even taken advantage of.

I would rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten.