IBM Turbonomic Reviews

• Single pane utilization, reporting on UCS, 3PAR, and VMware
• Capacity planning
• Placement recommendations

Turbonomic's largest impact is that I no longer have to manually monitor VM/host performance across vCenter's and clusters. This has been replaced with a single dashboard, which highlights recommended actions and reasons.

We have been using this solution since 2014.

I had one upgrade fail. I called support and it appeared to be a one-off problem. They had it fixed within 24 hours. This has been my one and only support call since deploying the application.

I never had issues with stability. It just works!

I'm monitoring 6 UCS Domains, 5 vCenter servers, 23 ESXi clusters spanning 115 hosts, and over 900 VMs in six countries. This little appliance has no issues.

I've had very pleasant experiences with customer service. Everyone with whom I have spoken has been prompt and knowledgeable.

I've only had one support call and it was a great. Comparing Turbonomic Support against HPE, VMware, and Cisco, is like comparing heaven and hell.

We evaluated SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. It was chaotic and took too much effort to truly see what was going on within the environment.

I think my six year old son could deploy it.

The implementation was done in-house.

I have never measured the ROI, but I would expect it to be massive since problem resolutions have decreased significantly.

Negotiate and analyze how you want to use the product (automate/analyze/both) and which systems you report against. You don't need to monitor all of your systems. I have a lot of small, remote locations that have two hosts and under 10 VMs, and it is not worth spending money for those sites. Let VMWare HA/DRS handle it, because you are probably not going to run into performance or scalability issues.

We evaluated vROps and SolarWinds Virtual Manager.

Do a 30-day demo and actually use the product. You will quickly see how good or bad of a VMware admin you are.

If you use 3PAR, EMC, NetApp, and/or UCS, this will be invaluable to you, especially if you have junior staff.

It is a great way to give them visibility into those environments without granting them access.

We use Turbonomic to gather information that we can archive and review when there are performance issues or other problems. We look at the statistical data and see what was going on at that particular time across the cluster and if there was an issue. I generally look at the underlying resources, IOP utilization, CPU, CPU-ready ballooning, and anything that might cause performance issues.
Turbonomic is better than using the native vCenter to look at that and we didn't have vROps or anything.

Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation.

The solution's analytics are less important today because of changes in our environment. When we started using it, it was essential because we had more performance issues with the technology we had at the time. Turbonomic helps us interpret data alerts and speed sheets, which also isn't as important as it used to be. The solution helped to reduce performance degradation in the past, but it's less of an issue these days because we have optimized our environmental design.

Turbonomic reduced our mean time-to-resolution by about 50-60 percent when I used it for that. I can't say that it has improved our information sharing because our IT team is super small. We've got three people that are on the infrastructure. However, I have some experience with much larger environments, and the information that's in Turbonomic is easier to consume for some IT teams that maybe aren't as familiar with the virtualization environment.

It improved our application response time when we used it a lot more for performance analytics. We could see what consumed more IOPS and put it on the appropriate lens, where memory was not assigned properly. We could increase memory utilization or CPU. 

We can identify what is over-provisioned or if there are too many IOPS going through a particular data endpoint. CPU processor utilization, memory ballooning, etc., impact performance. 

Turbonomic provides many recommendations for right-sizing VMs for the tasks they're doing. That saves us significant time because we don't need to look at all that information and use calculators to figure it out. Turbonomic can tell you. Turbonomic reduced the time spent managing the performance of existing assets, freeing up time to do extra development work. 

I saw improvements in application response times when I used it regularly to look at performance gains. We achieved an improvement of around 20 percent in heavy application performance by right-sizing VMs and ensuring resources were appropriately assigned. 

The sizing information is the most useful aspect of Turbonomic. It helps us know which machines are over-provisioned or under-provisioned. I also like the historical information from the environment about performance metrics, utilization, and the like. It's nice to go back and look at what was happening in it at any particular time.

I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable.

I have used Turbonomic for nearly nine years.

Turbonomic is highly stable. We haven't ever had any issues with the product.

Our environment is smaller, and we don't add many resources to what we have. However, it seems to scale pretty well based on what I know about the product.

I rate Turbonomic support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

Setting up Turbonomic was pretty straightforward. You deploy the OVA, answer some questions, and point it at your environment. It's one of the easier infrastructure products to implement. I deployed Turbonomic in one afternoon, so it was a couple of hours max. After deployment, we had to install regular updates, but it was easy to do. Two people are involved in maintaining the product. 

In the past, we've seen a return, but it's currently hard to justify the recurring cost.

We evaluated vROps before selecting Turbonomic. Setting up vROps was much more complex. It required more overhead and maintenance. Getting the information we needed was more complicated. 

I rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten overall. I recommend evaluating it. Turbonomic might be easier than the product you currently use. You might be able to use the DRS mechanism in Turbonomic to get recommendations, and auto-sizing could make your life a lot easier.

We have VM placement in Automated mode and currently have all other metrics in Recommend mode. We also have made use of the planning tool to project when in our migration and modernization project we would need to procure new hardware.

It has helped us to show real resource usage in order to justify or deny application owner requests for additional resources, and has helped us to rightsize our VMs to reclaim wasted CPU, memory, and disk space so we can avoid additional hardware procurement.

I like the detail I get in the old user interface and will miss some of that in the new interface when we perform our planned upgrade soon.

Six months plus an extended three-month PoC to convince our IT leadership of its usefulness.

No issues with deployment. It went very smooth.

I've had to reboot the appliance once to regain LDAP login abilities.

We've actually reduced our host footprint by using Turbonomic to rightsize things as we modernize and migrate.

Excellent customer service. We've had help with setting up custom reports and anytime we need to increase our license count it is a quick turnaround.

Excellent. Not many technical issues so far, but have been very helpful and knowledgeable. We will use them to get us migrated to 5.9 on CentOS from our current 5.7 on SUSE.

Just vCenter Server combined with years of experience with VMware to make resource determinations.

Initial setup was very straightforward. OVF download and deployment to live application in less than 30 minutes.

We implemented in-house but had a vendor team in for group training to show us how to better use the tools.

I'm not the finance guy, but being able to shrink our host footprint by 66% while increasing our virtualization would seem to me to be very advantageous.

Definitely more cost effective and with nearly the same options as other more expensive solutions. Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs.

Yes we did. We evaluated vRealize Automation and while I liked some of the additional features, for what we needed it for in our environment, Turbonomic was the better choice financially.

Take advantage of the deployment team to learn the best way to use it to your advantage in your environment.

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 biggest value I'm getting out of VMTurbo right now is the complete hands-off management of equalizing the usage in my data center. VMTurbo distributes all of my VMs equally across all of my hosts. I don't ever have to think about when a host is in more heavy use if there's going to be constrain on that single host that it lives on, because it rearranges everything for me through VMotion control.

The big benefits for me is a lot of time savings. I don't have to care and feed for each individual VM, and make sure that the environment's balanced just the right way. Also, I'm able to see which of my applications are taking more cycles, more compute cycles and RAM usage. I really can understand my environment a little bit better.

The one point is the reporting. We do have reports out of it, but they're not the level of graphical detail I would like.

One of the reasons we went with VMTurbo was because we wanted to replace vCOPS. We weren't getting the level of granularity and alerting out of vCOPS to really understand our individual VMs, but VMTurbo, I think, could do a little bit better job on reporting. I would love to use them in our monthly metrics meetings to really show in a very nice graphical way how our environment's growing, how many VMs did we grow from one month to the next. They have some reporting features that we could have a little bit better for us.

VMTurbo has been very stable for us. I can't actually recall an instance where it's crashed on us. We have rebooted it, and it comes right back up, and continues right where we left off, and continues to manage our infrastructure.

We started out with VMTurbo in our development and test data center managing over 400 virtual machines. The same instance now manages our entire production data center with our SaaS platform that all of our customers connect to. I didn't have to change anything. The virtual appliance handled it without breaking a sweat.

I had a question that came up, and I didn't know how to do something which was how to get very detailed application load on a particular server. I called in to the support, talked to the support gentleman, and he helped me get to the bottom of it. We actually even leveraged their development resources. He got them on the call with me, and so I was able to easily and quickly talk to tier III or even development support directly as a customer.

We have some specific instances come up where vCOPS was making recommendations on something like a SQL server. It said, "Hey, you only need 12 megabytes of RAM or 100 megabytes of RAM for the SQL server." Even old OS's just can't run with that low amount of memory. VMTurbo when we looked at it, we understood that it was going to make better recommendations. So far, that's been the case. We've been able to fully automate the distribution of our VMs among our hosts, where vCOPS and DRS really weren't doing the right job for us. They were creating imbalanced hosts. Some hosts would get overloaded, and we've ran into big problems.

It was very easy because it's a virtual appliance. We were able to download it into our network, connect it to vSphere, and within a few minutes of scanning our environment, it was able to plug in and connect to all of our VMs, and manage them for us.

I was still having to babysit a lot of the VMotion requirements for my environment. I was having to move things around manually. VMTurbo has promised, and the promise they delivered on was no more manual VMotions for eight months. That's been a huge time saver for me, and I can trust it to take care of my environment.

Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced. We also were able to get additional modules that helped us with our specific needs without much more costs.

Actually no. We were looking for a specific need, and I really hadn't seen anybody else out there besides what vCOPS said they could do to deliver automatic load balancing of virtual machines as well as right sizing VMs automatically, and I don't know anybody else out there doing that same thing.

I would say if you have a VMware environment that you are having to spend almost any time load balancing and VMotioning your machines, you're going to need VMTurbo. If you have constrained resources, if you have a limited budget on how many hosts you can buy, you're going to need something like VMTurbo to make sure that the applications that need CPU and RAM are getting it, and the ones that don't are resized so that you can get those resources back.

In reviewing it, we really like to get hands on. We engaged a lot of times through the VMware user group. We get sponsors out to those meetings. We can talk to them face to face. We also talked to our co-members, and find out what they're using and see what kind of results they've had. We've only heard nothing but good things from VMTurbo.

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.

Automation and the sizing function have been very valuable. As a multi-tenant cloud services provider, our engineers also rely heavily on the reporting function as one of their main go to tools.

There are a couple improvements: The sizing functions and the reporting are instrumental for the 600 engineers that login and use the product. They take the reports in both a troubleshooting capacity but also in a business review capacity, where they are able to share the trends with the client. Since our organization provides managed services to our clients, it is important our engineers are able to retrieve not only real-time data but the recommendations and rightsizing information instantly. VMTurbo’s automation component continuously helps us get the most out of our cloud infrastructure.

The reporting, there is always more information that could be extracted. VMTurbo as well as the Green Circle Community continuously adds/improves on the reporting. The other area would be visibility into bandwidth utilization. We presently use another tool to extract this information for each of our tenants. It would be nice to have this in a single pane of glass within VMTurbo Operations Manager.

We been using VMTurbo for almost two years.

I've upgraded at least 7/8 times. A couple of versions had issues but were remediated along the way.

It seems to be fairly stable.

Definitely scalable. Our licensing scheme allows us to go into and discover some of the acquisition environments that we've done and see what virtual environments these acquisitions have fairly quickly.

It's always been good - 10/10.

10/10.

We used a combination of solutions beforehand. In terms of VMTurbo I liked what I saw - scalability, the automation, etc. While we haven’t taken full advantage of every aspect VMTurbo has to offer, those modules and workflow we’re presently using have made an impact in our support to our clients.

Initial setup was straightforward.

In-house. I had contacted support on an as-need basis.

Right out of the box the hypervisor support is strong. VMWare shops probably get the most bang for your buck. UCS may be of use as well - additionally NetApp. Companies that have a single domain would find it easier to roll out the application management module due to only requiring the single set of credentials for deployment. Whereas in a multi-tenant environment, the provider requires visibility into each tenant’s domain which requires additional planning and may require a security design change.

With this platform we have automated our virtualization management and we are providing performance to our Apps when they needs it and saving CAPEX/ OPEX.

we only do investments in new hardwarie when the life cycle is ending or when Turbonomic have been a right sizing.

CAPEX and Management / sizing (OPEX).

We implemented Turbonomic this in March 2016.

We have mix of virtualization infrastructure. We have Hyper-V 2012 R2, vSphere 5.1 / 5.5 and 6.p, XenServer 6.02 / 7.0. Only with Hyper-V we have had a little issue for Windows Server configuration.

We have issues only when we upgrade the product, example in 5.7 we have issues with HyperV and VMM.

No issues.

7

9/10

SCOM and vRealize.

Within two weeks we were collecting metrics and watching how it was working. In a month is enough to do right recommendation for Turbonomic.

we Didn't implement with a vendor. We did alone only with Turbonomic support. It was very easy this deploy

In 9 months.

There is a balance of pricing between others software.

We used vRealize but it only works with VMware and that only works with thresholds. We didn't save the OPEX and we didn't solve the issues.

With Turbonomic Operations Manager automated all environment virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V, vSphere, XenServer) with one unique management console. We save our CAPEX working with a plan inside of Operations Manager when we change hardware by lifecycle or when we have new projects, we have a capacity planning with that.