IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature would have to be the out of box automation of VM placement. Without too much configuration, the dynamic and autonomous optimization provided by Turbonomic virtual machine placement is impressive.

With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past.

All eight of our vCentre clusters happily run hot at 90+% utilization with n+1 redundancy.

With over two and a half years of Turbonomic in operation, we are now using the planner functionality for an ongoing datacenter consolidation project. The accuracy of our initial planner results again have been impressive, and this will allow us to project investment costs in detail and with confidence.

Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement.

Including a four month pre-sales led PoC, Turbonomic has been in production just under three years.

Some minor reporting related issues with our initial production versions, which were promptly resolved by Turbonomic support.

No issues with stability, since we moved Turbonomic into production.

Again, we have not come across any issues here.

Customer service is very good and proactive, with the customer experience team keeping in touch regularly.

With only some minor issues, technical support for us has been very good.

SolarWinds Virtualisation Manager, more of a reporting engine, and lacking any preventive optimization functionality.

We moved to Turbonomic for its performance automation. The included reporting and alerting ability is a nice to have, but more or less obsolete.

The initial OVA based setup, including setting up one or two service accounts, took less than 20 minutes. I believe that our vSphere environment was discovered in less than an hour.

After registering for an extended trial license, the implementation was done by our in-house team under continuous support from Turbonomic consulting.

As part of the implementation, Turbonomic provided our business with detailed ROI projections based on our "live" Turbonomic data. By now, cost savings, by guided hardware consolidation and freeing up engineering resources, are very favorable, as projected.

What I can advise is to trial the product, taking advantage of the Turbonomic pre-sales implemention support and kickstart training.

Yes, we ran a short trial of Dell Foglight for Virtualisation.

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.

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.

The automation makes my life easier because I know my VMware clusters are balanced across all my hosts.

Performance issues have decreased since there's no longer bottlenecks on certain ESXi hosts.

The GUI has been updated since I first started using Turbonomics which was a welcomed improvement. Initially the GUI was difficult to follow and find where things are. It's gotten better but the GUI could still use some work to make certain functions more obvious.

Approximately a year now.

Deployment was quite easy, learning the product took some time but my sales contact took the initiative and scheduled a 45 minute webex to go over the product with me and my team. Some team members couldn't be present at the original time so my sales contact scheduled a second webex for them.

Once the product was up and running the hardest part was handing over the reigns to it. I implemented some custom rules for certain trouble VMs in my environment and, after some time, finally allowed the product to go fully automated and never looked back since.

I haven't had a need to increase or decrease the amount of hosts i'm monitoring. From the GUI i'm able to find the top 10 worst offending VMs for resource utilization or what have you fairly easily. I'm monitoring 15 or so ESXi hosts with nearly 1000 VMs, I haven't had any issues with the product not able to handle my scale.

Customer service has been exceptional, I get quartly updates via the phone and they remember me. I get too busy to remember to upgrade occasionally so my sales contact is good at reminding me without nagging :)

I haven't had a need to contact their technical support since the product is fairly simple to figure out.

I used to monitor my vm performance from the VMware thick client but there were too many places to look to find what I needed to identify an issue. I deployed a few products to test out and settled with Turbonomics since their interface had the most information available on one page for what I was looking for as well as the ability to create customized reports for daily monitoring.

Really straightforward, just deploy an OVF template to your VMware environment. Configure a service account and setup permissions within VMware so the account can access what you want it to and stop it from accessing hosts you don't want to monitor.

I implemented the solution myself, I did receive help from my sales contact via WebExs for some things I wasn't sure about.

I don't have any way to discern a monetary figure on the benefits for using Turbonomic... I would say if anything it offers me the ability to offload monitoring of my virtual environment and focus more on other things. It's freed up a great deal of time I've spent in the past troubleshooting performance issues and manually verifying that VMware was balanced correctly.

Only license what you want to monitor, this product will monitor everything connected to your vCenter unless you restrict the access of the service account. having the restrictions in place ahead of deployment can make for a much easier time dealing with the licenses. Pricing-wise this wasn't the cheapest but it also wasn't the most expensive. I was more looking for something to fit my needs than something affordable so price wasn't something I put too much thought into.

We evaluated a few products: SolarWinds, we already have implemented monitoring other things but the virtual monitoring left me with a lot to desire.

Veeam, another application we have implemented elsewhere but was very pricey to get what I wanted.

vCOPS, very cumbersome and hard for me to trust it when the native performance monitoring doesn't work well already.

My experience with Turbonomic has been exceptional, they've offered me a $25 gift card to write a review of their company but I'd gladly write them a review for free. They really are a great company to work with and they have a great product.

Turbonomic's best features for my needs are the autonomic scheduling, capacity planning, and right sizing capabilities. It is like VMware DRS and SDRS on steroids, predicting VM contention issues before they happen and migrating workloads accordingly.

I no longer have to worry about workload management, and when it comes time to plan for expansion it is no longer a hardware guessing game. Turbonomic can tell you exactly what hardware you will need based on the proposed workload. You can even input your own desired hardware configs to get more precise details on the report.

Turbonomic's current UI is coded in Flash though they have stated an HTML5 version is coming soon.

5 years.

No issues with deployment, however my original virtual appliance was so old that support had to forklift upgrade the database this year to their newer version so I could get the latest code. Was very simple and painless.

None.

None so far. My environment doesn't task the scalability meter though.

10/10

10/10

I previously looked at vCenter Operations Manager (previous name of vRealize Ops Manager) and it was not nearly as feature rich at Turbonomic at the time.

Not at all, deploy it, give it an IP or DHCP then connect to vCenter. 2-3 hours later you will start to see recommendations.

In-house, implemented it myself.

ROI on this tool was within 3 months. We had over-provisioned on the virtual and physical side after our previous upgrade to the VMware systems. Turbonomic brought our virtual infrastructure back down to size and saved us from upgrading hardware again for over a year.

They license by socket. Buy for the sockets you need.

They have a free version of the exact same appliance which just has features greyed out. Try it out and see what they can do for you for free straight from their website.

Turbonomic helps me maintain a lean operations team. What used to take half my day now is automated. ROI on this is a no-brainer.

It automatically adjusts resource allocations and VM placement to improve utilisation and ensure service delivery. Increased visibility and control has meant higher VM density per host. The 'plan' tab allows for accurate capacity forecasting for upcoming projects.

We now have intelligently controlled VMs with consistent performance, it has helped us avoid purchase of additional hardware and software through increased utilisation in excess of 90%. It also eliminated configuration and capacity planning guesswork and has even identified where people have over-provisioned VMs so we can take back those resources and use them for other VMs.

User Interface can initially seem a bit 'busy', but you get used to that once you learn what it's showing you.

We have used this for 2 years

No, it only took 15 minutes to get up and running!

Initially there were some minor problems in the earlier releases, but these appear to have been overcome and the product has been very stable for at least the past 12 months.

No

Very good

Excellent, VMTurbo even proactively contact us when new releases come out to ensure we have been able to update ok and to explain the new features of that release.

We used to manually try and work out where we had spare resource using tools like vCenter and NetApp System Manager, we had to move to something more intelligent as it was clear that we had untapped resource available, but we couldn't identify with 100% certainty where it was.

Very straightforward, we powered up the trial VMTurbo virtual appliance, gave it an IP address, pointed it at vCenter and the NetApp clusters and started using the product straight away.

In-house

Our ROI was less than 12 months as we would otherwise have needed to purchase additional hardware and VMware licenses during that time period, as we were previously adding at least 4 CPUs worth each year.

2 years later we still haven't had to purchase any more, even though we have had a significant increase in the total number of VMs running in the environment.

It's very reasonable when you compare it against the cost of buying more VMware hosts, licenses and potentially storage. Don't forget to include the ongoing support costs for the additional hardware and VMware licenses as those really rack up over the 3-5 year lifespan of a server!

We looked at vCenter Operations Manager, but the effort involved just to stand up a PoC environment was significantly more than with VMTurbo, so after a web demo of vCOps we decided not to proceed with that option.

Give the demo version a go, you might be surprised by the results!

We have benefited from both the workload placement and analysis of our hosts via running plans. Soon we will embark on rightsizing. This tool offers us the best mechanism we have had so far to implement this effort.

Our clusters are more balanced now than relying on DRS to manage workloads. Also, with the plan data, we are able to have actual data behind what our clusters look like now, how to best optimize them, and if we can afford to remove hosts. This will help us run an efficient, high performing environment while also limiting out licensing costs.

Have plan data shared across user accounts within Turbonomic. Also more granular permissions. We would benefit greatly from more flexibility than the current roles available. Finally, reduce the time to have the efficiency data repopulate into the GUI.

Less than one year.

No.

No.

No.

9/10. I have received prompt and quality service.

9/10. I have received prompt and quality service.

Initial setup was with the "appliance" package but we decided to migrate to a RHEL server. Both the setup and migration were documented well and easy to follow.

Our initial build was done in-house and was followed up with a training session. The trainer was knowledgeable, but we have received a higher level tech advice, as we moved forward, from other resources at Turbonomic.

No