IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Reporting and Automation are the most valuable features.

With the reporting I am able to 'right size' my environment from the amount of cores and memory a VM actually needs to how many hosts I need to run that environment in. With automation, my machines are moved to the most efficient host based on the data that VMTurbo gathers, this is more efficient than DRS and WAY more efficient than doing this manually.

The planning feature, though they have apparently made some gains on this with the new release coming out soon. If I use the default templates, the planning feature works great, but we were recently trying to model a plan that would make all 850 VDI desktops dual core, we had some struggles getting this to work correctly but I am told this was addressed and should have no issues with the next release.

7 Months.

No issues with deployment.

I have had some issues from time to time with DB table errors, though not sure if it is a product issue or the storage I am on. The most recent issue came from my UCS losing connection to the LAN and the storage array briefly.

I have not tried to scale yet.

They have been great so far, very attentive. If I have submitted a ticket, I get a response really quickly and the issue is generally fixed soon after.

Great as well, any time I have had an issue they have been able to jump right in and fix it.

We were using vCenter Operations manager. I made the switch because vCops gave a lot of good info, but that was all it did. VMTurbo allows me to automate the recommendations if I choose, but it also gives me visibility into the UCS infrastructure we have VMware running on. This allows me to drill in further than what I could do with vCops at a much lower price.

Very easy, just deploy the appliance and enjoy. There is very little setup that goes into this.

We did this all in-house with the help of VMTurbo.

I do not have hard data to back this up, but I would say that this product has already paid for itself in the reporting that I am able to give to management, as well as automatically moving VM’s to other hosts to better perform without any interaction from my staff.

I believe our initial investment was $25k. I don’t have a day to day number, but it is pretty low as I generally jump into it once or twice a day for 5-10 minutes to look over the main screen to see if anything is going crazy and then print off some reports for management. I have email alerting set up, but I like to jump into the main interface.

vCops and Foglight.

Just do it, it takes very little time and effort to install, and once it is the data comes in relatively fast. That data will show you immediate issues that you can address. Then set up automation to move your machines to the most appropriate hosts. After that, start digging into the planning power that this thing has, and is getting better at. I think people will be shocked at how easy this is to get going and how much information you can get from it. Spend some time really learing the workload screen as well, it is worth the time.

I mostly provide it to my clients. There are multiple reasons why they would use it depending on the client's needs and their solution. 

Turbonomic provides visibility and analytics into an environment’s performance. The visibility and analytics help bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams, such as Applications and Infrastructure. Having this visibility, specifically for cloud optimization, is extremely important

This has helped reduce our mean time to resolution (MTTR). On average there is about a 10% to 20% reduction, but it can be up to 60%.

Turbonomic has shortened application response time. It has made them more agile.

It's very good for optimizing the monitoring of the public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, and/or Kubernetes. There are some health tools. It is extremely good for that. It is good for our clients to have visibility. It helps to have a complete view of what is going on.

Their automation has helped engineers focus on innovation and ongoing modernization projects. It has saved us about 30% of our work time. Having visibility for particular solutions helped resolve issues, troubleshoot the management of clusters, and so on. It helped to reallocate resources to other parts of the business.

Our clients have seen about 10%-20% of savings from utilizing Turbonomic. 

It is a good holistic platform that is easy to use. It works pretty well.

It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications.

I have been in the IT industry for about 25 years, and I have been working with this solution for about six years.

It is extremely stable. It works perfectly.

The scalability is okay. It sometimes has problems with the hybrid nature of things, but it is fairly scalable.

We do not use their support. Everything is done in-house.

We have used different ones provided by VMware. The solution is specific to the client. Turbonomic is one of the solutions we provide. It is extremely good and very easy to use. 

I am not involved in its deployment. In terms of maintenance, there are general updates, and making sure the platform works and you are getting what you need from it.

The deployment model depends on the requirements, but 90% of the time, it is in the cloud. In certain classes, it is deployed in the cloud, managing multiple hybrid infrastructures between the cloud and on-prem. In certain circumstances, it is separated between different sites across the globe.

I would definitely recommend a trial. It is a very good product, and it is worth its weight. It is something that is invaluable to most customers.

I would rate Turbonomic a nine out of ten.

Workload placement. The "financial" idea works very well, and has allowed us to reduce our infrastructure footprint significantly without impacting performance.

I seem to find a new bug with each new version. It's software, so I can understand, but I think the QA process needs improved.

Approximately two years.

No issues with deployment.

No stability issues.

Not yet.

I've been impressed with the customer service team's desire to help and keep things smooth.

Technical support is excellent. The support crew work very hard to ensure that we have what we need, from basic information and support, to getting custom SQL queries written.

We previously used Reflex/StrataCloud. We moved for the ease of use and the workload placement functionality.

Initial setup was performed by a teammate who has moved on, but as I recall, it was a straightforward process.

In-house.

I'm not able to speak to this. I don't have the financial data to determine a real ROI. I don't believe it's been as high as the sales team initially claimed it would be, but that's at least partly due to our environments. It's not easy to make rightsizing decisions in an environment where applications may not always be running on a box.

Take the time to evaluate the complete suite. The base package does a lot, but there are several modules that make the product more complete end to end, and are at least worth investigating.

We did not. The teammate mentioned previously had used the product in a prior role and was able to convince the required parties of the tool's value.

Scenario planning - The ability to look at a selection of resources and play around with different scenarios; move, duplicate, re-locate to a new cluster or DC.

The tool allows us to reduce the operational time spent managing our vSphere estate and more time developing new systems for the business.

Current toolset uses Flash and doesn't look as modern as some other platforms. The use of flash as a tool for creating the portal is dated in that most vendors are now delivering these types of web portals via HTML5 and supporting multi-device formats rather than requiring flash. The flash interface looks dated and is a little cluttered making navigating the portal less than optimal.

Other reasons flash is not desired is for the obvious security risk of enabling flash in modern browsers. Most vendors are looking to move to HTML5 or have done so. I believe that Turbonomic is actively developing an HTML5 based version of the tool as they now have a preview available within the portal of this, although I have no dates yet as to when this is meant to be made live.

Six months.

None at all.

None.

None.

Excellent. The support service is very proactive and extremely helpful with any request asked of them.

Very high. We have some challenges around restrictions of rules to certain areas of our estate which tech support assisted with in a very quick time.

Had been using vROps but product was too expensive and didn't offer the flexibility that this product does.

Setup is very easy. Takes a little extra config to add in storage arrays but well worth the extra time to do for the results that brings

In-house.

We have saved more from cost avoidance on a recent expansion than the product will cost over three years.

Look at deals that can show you an ROI within 12 months - easy to get approved and the product lives up to the hype.

No.

None.

The Automation and Planning capabilities are unique, innovative, and game-changing for us.

We are able to maintain a much higher level of performance and efficiency in our virtual environment with the same or reduced levels of staffing.

We would like to see VMTurbo develop more application-specific modules that give us additional visibility into the end-user experience.

18 Months.

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

No problems with scalability.

Excellent.

Excellent.

We used monitoring tools like Solarwinds Orion and vFoglight. They're fine products but they don't really compete with VMTurbo in that they are not actually performing command and control operations. VMTurbo actually does things way beyond DRS and Storage DRS. Our monitoring solutions just overwhelmed us with data and there's a big difference between knowing a problem exists and proactively preventing or fixing one without human involvement.

We simply installed their VM and turned it on. Thirty minutes later we made the decision to go live with virtual machine automation and have not looked back.

No, we did it ourselves with relatively minimal support from VMTurbo.

I would say we recouped our investment within two months. We were purchasing an average of six or seven hosts per year (at $20K-30K each). Based on the increased awareness of our infrastructure utilization rate, and VMTurbo-driven performance efficiencies, we eliminated the need to buy and deploy any new servers for 18 months.

I think our startup cost was around $49K (plus another $40K or so for the VNX storage module eight months later). The day-to-day cost is about $50/day.

Just load the demo. It's completely non-invasive and you will probably be blown away by how much over-provisioning you have been doing.

We use the Reserved Instances and the recommendations of sizing of our family types in Azure. We use it for cost optimization for our workloads there.

We started with the on-prem solution, but then we went with the SaaS model. Now, Turbonomic handles the installation and the support of the appliances.

The volumes feature lets us know which volumes or disks are not attached or that are not being used anymore and that we can go ahead and delete them. It tells us how much money we'll be saving if we delete them. It's the same thing with Reserved Instances. It has that ability, that visibility, with those recommendations. 

There is also the family type that tells you which family the VM is going to and how much you're going to be saving. Disk tiering is one of the latest features. If you go from premium to standard, it shows you just how much you're going to be saving. It makes those decisions based on metrics.

When it comes to cloud costs, to VMs, the solution is saving us about $30,000 a month. It has also definitely reduced our IT-related expenditures by about $40,000 per month. And when it comes to the human resource time involved in monitoring and optimizing our estate, it saves us about 20 hours a week.

The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like. 

One other useful feature in Turbonomic is the support for Kubernetes. That's one of the things that I have worked on with Kevin, our account rep, from Turbonomic. We're going to work on setting that up because our developers are pushing hard for Kubernetes for containers this year. Knowing that it's supporting that is awesome.

Something that Turbonomic started doing, just a couple of months ago with one of their latest releases, is the potential savings when it comes to disks. It is very promising. They make recommendations based on the type of disks. For example, if you're using a premium SSD, it makes recommendations, based on I/O metrics, to go to a standard SSD. Those types of recommendations are very valuable and that's another area where we see cost savings, which is awesome.

One ask that I'm waiting for, now that they have the ability to make recommendations for disks, for volumes, and disk tiering, is all about consumption. For example, we have a lot of VMs now, and these VMs use a lot of disks. Some of these servers have 8 TB disks, but they're only being used for 200 GBs. That's a lot of money that we're wasting. In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings. And we would have more of a success rate than with the disk tiering, at least in our case.

Also, unfortunately, there is no support for cost optimization for networking.

I've been using Turbonomic for about three years.

It was definitely more stable on-prem. The reason I say that is because we've had several times where we have run into licensing issues. I don't know why that has been the case, although they have been few and far between. 

But when it has no issues, it runs just as if it were on-prem. The performance and the stability are not a problem.

It's a mature product. It very quickly detects when new VMs, new workloads, are added. You don't have to wait long. The tool picks things up very quickly in our environment.

Their technical support is excellent. I would rate them a nine out of 10. Whenever I send an email, they respond back. The only reason I don't give them a 10 is that I have been waiting for some time now on the Reserve Instances to work again. That's the only thing that has been a downer because we rely on them heavily. We are now having to use the Azure tool for that, and before the issue with Reserve Instances, we didn't have to. There's a lot of overlap between Azure on Turbonomic, but Turbonomic works better for us.

An aspect of the Turbonomic team that I have found, working with them over the years, is that whenever we've had an issue, they have always been willing to listen and to address it and to add the features we need. For example, when we started, Reserved Instances was really not up to par. But they listened to their customers and they started making changes. As time has gone on, the product has matured. They've incorporated a lot of the features that we've asked for into their appliance.

We tried it first on-prem, years ago. We used to host it. I installed it and updated it, working with the Turbonomic team. When it was hosted in our environment, I was responsible for everything.

The initial setup was straightforward. Because it was an appliance, the deployment took about an hour to stand it up. We use VMware on-prem so it was done with an OVA file, and it was pretty much a "next-next" process because the OVA is already packaged with how the tool should be deployed. There are certain custom inputs needed, like the name of the appliance, and how much storage. But everything else was already pre-packaged. The configuration definitely took a little bit longer.

The only downside was that Turbonomic came out with many releases. The latest releases had the latest features, but it required continuous upgrades. If we wanted to take advantage of one feature we continued to have to upgrade the appliance on-prem. That is why, when we found out that they do have a SaaS model, we went with that instead. We wanted Turbonomic to worry about things like the licensing, the updates, et cetera. We don't have to worry about that at all now, and that has been a huge relief. That has saved us a lot of time, for sure.

We didn't have to do any type of migration to their SaaS offering. They took care of everything in the back end.

We have five engineers who use the product, including a networking engineer, a storage engineer, and our DevOps team.

There are competitors out there. Since we're in Azure, which is the only cloud vendor that we use today, it has something called cost Azure Advisor, to help you with costs. I've tried it because it comes with it and we're paying for it, but Turbonomic is a better tool for us. We always seem to gravitate more toward it because everything is right there in that single pane of glass. It gives you recommendations based on Reserve Instances, even though right now, unfortunately, that's not working 100 percent. It does a lot of things, like the family types and the deleted volumes, and that type of automation for us, which is awesome. Azure Advisor does give you that as well, but it doesn't have everything. We have to drill down in it and it's not easy to navigate.

At one point the most valuable feature for us was Reserved Instances. The only problem with that today is that last year we changed from the EA licensing model to an MCA. At this moment, unfortunately, the Reserved Instances is not working. They're still working on it. It's in the roadmap, but that definitely was a big selling point for us. It worked well for us because we purchase a lot of Reserved Instances for our VMs.

Turbonomic makes a lot of recommendations to help prevent resource starvation. We can't implement all of them because it depends on our workloads. Not all the recommendations work for us because workloads on some of our VMs are very seasonal. There may be three times throughout the year, for about two weeks, where those VMs' usage is very high. They have to work at a high level. The solution can only go back a maximum of three months, and it won't work for us in some of those workloads because it doesn't have full visibility into the past year. But for some of our other workloads, those recommendations work.

Optimization of application performance is an ongoing process for us, especially as we move VMs from on-prem to Azure, or even build new VMs in Azure. More apps are being created and more services are being created, and we're taking advantage of that within Azure. However, we don't use Turbonomic's automation mode to continuously assure application performance by having the software manage resources in real-time. Our DevOps team is using Azure to control that automation.

For us, Turbonomic is an infrastructure service, VMs. As for applications, not yet, because now that we're introducing Kubernetes into our Azure environment, while it does have support for that, I don't know what it looks like yet. I have a meeting scheduled with them in order to configure that. It doesn't create it for you automatically in the back end. But it's more for our IaaS, infrastructure as a service. For storage, the closest thing now is the disk tiering with recommendations for going from and to different types of standard and premium SSD and HDD disks. Before, there wasn't that level of support. It was just VMs and family types, in our case.

We use manual execution for implementing the solution’s actions. We use manual because it depends on the business. We run a 24/7 shop. That's how it has always been on-prem, and that's how it is now in Azure, for our production VMs. We need to schedule maintenance windows because some of the recommendations from Turbonomic require a reboot. We need to schedule downtime with the application owners within the business.

Automated and intelligent vMotions, VM right-sizing, storage capacity optimization, reporting, and planning.

We automate our vMotions, so it has helped us keep congestion on our hosts way down, and has been more effective than DRS. We also have used wasted storage report to reclaim over 2TB of storage from orphaned files that would have had to have been manually located before. Turbonomic has also helped with workload and capacity planning, allowing us to be more accurate with requesting expansion during budgeting.

I'd like to see an improvement in the reporting, from including more canned reports, to being able to more easily customize the existing ones (without needing to write SQL queries).

About one year.

None.

Here and there, during some older revisions. Since the 5.7 update (I believe) it's been pretty solid. Our issues seemed to relate to the discovery process and inventory, but we haven't had issues for several months now.

Nothing so far.

Very good. When I've opened cases, I get contacted quickly, and am able to work with an engineer fairly quickly. I've also posted questions and non-critical items on the Green Circle community (Turbonomic's user community), and many times I've gotten quick response from our account manager and engineers.

Very good as well.

No.

Very straightforward. It was as simple as loading an OVA, setting the networking, and pointing it at our vCenter. Tweaks have been made over time as needed, but the initial setup was quick and painless.

In-house team, with some recommendations from Turbonomic engineers.

I don't have an exact number, but we have saved lots of time on troubleshooting performance issues.

Nothing specific, just to only license what you need. For us, we license only our production environment. It would be at least a 25% increase if we licensed our development/test environment too.

We evaluated Foglight and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager before deciding on Turbonomic (or VMTurbo at the time).

No.

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.