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.
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.
Nice review. We too use Turbonomic in our environment for automation machine moves mainly. I also use it extensively for the Planning module when projects come up requiring more VM additions to the environment. It let's me see a report in minutes versus days with the old spreadsheet method. Great product and support all around.