IBM Turbonomic Reviews

VM automation to keep clusters' performance at its best.

Keeps clusters aligned, compute wise. We also use the planning and forecasting tools to determine needs.

Planning tools could be easier to use. Depending on your needs, it can be time consuming to get what you want.

A few years now.

No.

Every so often, and it usually needs a reboot to recover.

Not yet.

Customer success team is awesome. Sometimes the support team can take a long time to respond.

Good, but slow at times. If it's a really hot issue we can usually get a quick response though, after escalation.

Native VMware tools.

Easy.

In-house.

More of a cost avoidance for us, meaning that it saves us from over-provisioning and allows more density.

Yes.

The Turbonomics team is always looking for ways to improve their product. They are also willing to engage the customer success team to help us find new ways or easier ways to get more from the product. This is refreshing in a world where, after purchase, you are usually on your own after installing, other than support. That is not the case with this team.

The customizable dashboard lets us get quick insight into our environment. The quick overview of your environment allows you to get to fixing the things that matter most quickly.

It allows us to plan accordingly for any future growth.

There needs to be a way to permanently ignore certain alerts, such as if you have a server where you know the HDD space is low but also know it's never going to grow any to tell it to always ignore that one. Also email alerts for HDD space do not seem to exist, or if they do they aren't working properly or they aren't self explanatory to setup.

About a year.

No, we did not have any deployment issues

No issues with stability

Customer service is top notch, the product demos and trial we got early on were very helpful.

We haven't had to use tech support yet but I'm sure they are fantastic

We did use Virtualization Manager before and it didn't seem near as robust as Turbonomic and it was more expensive so we switched.

Setup was very easy.

We implemented it with the help of VMTurbo team.

This is an overall great and easy to use product and has been very helpful in our organization, definitely recommend it!

Turbonomic is hyper-visor agnostic, so we use it to monitor both our VMware and XenServer environments. It helps identify when a virtual machine needs additional resources or to be migrated to another host. The migration we allow to happen automatically. However, changing resources we look at the recommendation and may or may not take the suggestion for various reasons. 

Due to the loss of our primary VMware administrator, my colleagues had to take over managing the virtual environment. There were settings for various reservations set at one of our locations. Although memory/CPU may have been increased at some point on these systems, it was not until Turbonomic recommended increasing the reservations that we realized these settings were in place.

More recently, we have used it in planning data center upgrades. It allowed us to determine how many additional blades we may need due to upcoming projects. We built a template on the new model of blades we were considering, and of the new SAP HANA VM's we were going to be needing. It provided a plan of how many blades we would need to add to the environment to accommodate this expansion, which allowed for more accurate budget planning. 

When you log in to Turbonomic, I find the Assure Service Performance that appears on the dashboard the most useful item. This option shows virtual machines that may need additional memory, CPU, or to be migrated to other storage to ensure performance. The product can be configured to do all of this automatically, but I like have more control of the changes. Plus, the way we have our storage configured, it is best that one of the admins selects which data store a machine is migrated to. I also like the reporting feature and have several of them set to automatically generate and email to me at the end of the month. One in particular shows snapshots that are still on the virtual machines. This prevents forgotten snapshots from existing for weeks, months, or even years.

Based on the way we currently use the product I do not have any recommended improvements. However, we do not have may of the automated features configured at this time.

Three to five years.

No issues with stability.

There have been no issues with scalability. Currently, it is used to monitor several hypervisor environments including XenServer, VMware, VXRail, etc.

Customer Service:

The customer service has always been very responsive and friendly.

Technical Support:

Technical support responds quickly and always keeps you updated on any issues that may require some research. One of the processes is uploading or exporting a copy of your current environment. This gives support a copy of your environment to try to replicate a problem, if needed.

We previously had vCOPS, but that was charged per VM and could not monitor and report on our XenServer environment.

Setup is relatively straightforward. There is a template to deploy and configure the initial IP address. After that, the rest of the configuration is performed through the web GUI. This includes adding various environments, setting up reports, configuring actions, etc.

Since we were an early adopter, the deployment was performed with in-house staff on a WebEx with Turbonomiocs, although it is simple enough that you do not really need assistance with it.

The ROI would mainly be less time troubleshooting performance issues within the various virtual environments. Since we have a mixed environment, any issues that may impact performance appear on one dashboard, regardless of the environment. This saves the team a lot of time.

The pricing is fairly straightforward. It is based on the number of physical CPUs. There is now an option for per VM pricing. This can be valuable if you are monitoring VM's in a Cloud environment. 

No, but as mentioned before we did have vCOPS and chose this as a replacement.

I highly recommend this product, particularly if you have a heterogeneous virtual environment.

• Moving VMs
• Storage moves in conjunction with DRS
• The planning function
• Rightsizing VMs

We used Turbonomic to plan our hardware refresh, and it was right on the money. Now, we are using it to plan VM moves to the cloud.

This is more of a feature request than a need for improvement. I would like to be a able to track growth over time by cluster and be able to define the clusters to use for enterprise summary. I would also like to be able to get an enterprise summary from the aggregator appliance.

Six years.

If you can download a Virtual Desk Machine (VMDK) file and assign it an IP, you can deploy Turbonomic in minutes.

Turbonomic has been very stabile.

None.

Customer Service:

Turbonomic provides excellent customer service. They are very responsive.

Technical Support:

One of the best technical support groups out of all of our vendors. They are very responsive.

Download OVF file, then configure the IP, enter your VC credentials, and boom, you are done. Just one virtual appliance.

In-house.

12 months.

vROPs.

You should at least try this out. The install is simple and the product is intuitive. What other solution is capable of showing you an issue, recommending a solution, and making the necessary changes to resolve the issue?

• Assure service performance
• Policy/automation
• Plan/capacity planning
• Application module
• Network module

Assure Service Performance: This feature is useful, because it gives us insightful information (similar to ESXTOP, but minus all the analysis) about a virtual machine (VM), whether it is over-provisioned or under-provisioned. The recommendations help us maintain a well-balanced virtual environment.

Policy/Automation: We set up a policy of automatically adding more vCPUs to the VMs based on Turbonomic's recommendation and continuous monitoring. This feature serves a dual-purpose for us: alleviate administrative tasks for our sysadmins and help maintain the highest performance in our VMs.

Plan: It is a great tool for capacity planning. It helps to eliminate all the guesses and gives us a good idea of the hardware specs we will need for future expansion.

Application/Network Module: Another great features that we use in our environment to help autoscale our application servers, so they are performing smoothly and fluidly with minimal intervention.

It would be helpful to have the option to display the target(s) by their host name instead of their IP address. Also, hopefully Turbonomic will continue to increase supports for more target types (vendors).

For me, a bit over a year. However, our team has been using it for years.

It has been a while, and I forgot. If there were any issues, they were probably very minimal. Otherwise, it was pretty straightforward.

Nothing so far.

No.

It has been excellent.

It has been excellent.

We were using both Veeam and VMTurbo at one point, but it was management's decision to go with VMTurbo.

It wasn't too complex.

Vendor team. They were knowledgeable and the deployment was pretty smooth.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Veeam.

There are three main areas that that we find priceless. The automation, planning/forecasting and reporting.

The reporting has allowed us to quickly evaluate our VM infrastructure and where we stand on a day to day basis. The planning/forcasting feature has allowed us to plan for additional hardware. At times, it has saved us lots of money when we did not need to purchase additional hardware even though we thought we would.

The new HTML5 version is not as user friendly as I had hoped.

We've had Turbonomic deployed for about 12 months now - plus the initial trial period.

Deployment was very straightforward. Transition from trial to fully licensed was just as simple

Turbonomic has been very stable. Honestly, we forget it's even running, until we need to look at a report or have growth/expansion plans for our infrastructure.

No, we have not. Initially we used it for our Production Cluster but have recently expanded it to our SQL Cluster without issue.

They are fast, polite and knowledgable.

They are on par with customer service; fast, polite and knowledgable.

No, we did not use anything beforehand.

Straightforward with no issues.

implemented in-house.

It has saved us from buying lots of hardware that we would have bought if it weren't for Turbonomic. The planning/forcasting tool is the most valuable feature. This feature alone will pay for itself because it saves you from purchasing unneeded hardware in the first year alone.

The pricing is very competitive and much cheaper than VMware.

VMware Operations Manager.

Any company with a virtual infrastructure should have Turbonomic.

Turbonomic has some very useful features like being able to link multiple clusters together to for a super cluster allow us to balance out our load as needed. We also have started using the automation available in Turbonomic to automate some of our workloads that have been virtualized.

From a engineer perspective the ability to automate and show what is being used and what is really needed has helped us gain traction with virtualization. Also allowing application teams to login to Turbonomic and scope them to their servers has been a very valuable tool for us.

I think the UI could be cleaned up some which I know they are working on. I have seen the demo and it looks good from what I have seen so far. Also reporting needs to be worked on, the lack of ability to edit a report has been a challenge. Also vROps has better canned reports.

2 years now.

Deployment is almost two easy. We have been working through challenges with the storage module but support continues to push through that to find out what my real issue is there.

Product has been stable since the install.

None.

Customer service has been amazing, the guys on the tech teams have been available and helpful every time we have had an issue.

Very good technical support.

vCOPS

Install is almost to easy and the tool is up and running in no time.

We installed the appliance.

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.