IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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.

We used vRA from VMware. 

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.

We really take advantage of the PLAN feature, as forecasting and planning resources is imperative for effective and efficient operations management. Our fiscal responsibility considerations are key and important.

As we project growth and expansion, we have to consider high availability and redundancy. We also have to consider business continuity and keeping track of current and future assets. Those items are really key to this program.

We would like additional insight into our virtual environment, which increases the credibility and integrity of the systems we manage and administer.

We've been using the product for three years.

Our deployment was seamless.

We haven't experienced any stability issues.

We have been able to scale and use the product without any interruptions.

In our experience, we've had excellent Account Managers. Our questions have been researched and responded to in a timely fashion.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10. They have been very responsive.

We did not use a solution before this.

We pretty much set up the product from the documentation provided. This was originally one of the few products we researched that was a single virtual appliance.

We implemented in-house

I couldn't give a dollar amount, but this has increased the credibility of our virtual environment.

If you compare other solutions, you'll witness the value of the product.

We evaluated VFoglight.

It's been a great fit for our organization.

• 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.

The default dashboards give an excellent view of the current health of the virtual infrastructure. But its not just current health, it give sensible recommendations for remediation. Creating custom dashboards is easy and gives quick visibility into specific groups of systems or metrics.

We have been able to get the most out of our hardware investment as its being used more efficiently. Virtual machine resource over and under commitment quickly filters to the top and can be addressed. We are also using the storage integration module which allows us to track storage performance from virtual machine to storage controller.

When trying to view a trend at 4+ day period, the trend lines tend to flatten out and move to a single data point a day.

We have been using this product for about 2 and a half years.

No issues and it can't get any easier. Love the virtual appliance deployment.

None.

None.

I'm in contact with our Customer Experience Manager every month. He is always checking to see how things are going, asking what can be improved, and offering assistance in using the functions of the product.

I've had very few interactions with support but the ones I've had have been very helpful and resolved the issue.

None.

Step 1. Deploy OVA.
Step 2. Connect to vCenter.
Step 3. Complete

Pretty Straightforward.

In-house.

Within 15 minutes of deploying the virtual appliance, we had some valuable data about our environment and starting using the recommendations for VM resizing and moves within the 32 blade cluster. After about a month of following the recommendations, we found we trusted Turbonomic enough to start automating the resizing and moves. Recently, we've even used it to vacate an entire storage array onto a new one for about 1800 VMs. Everything worked flawlessly without a hiccup.

It has essentially replaced the need for 2-3 operations personnel managing requests for RAM/CPU resizing for VDIs. 

Would still like the ability to pick tiers of performance for workstations. For instance, would like to create a group wherein workstations could only scale between 4-8GB RAM, 8-16GB, 16-32GB, etc. This would fall inline with VMWare's Horizon Air performance tiers. 

We've been using Turbonomic almost 18 months now. 

Very simple to deploy, less than 20 minutes before we could start seeing data and recommendations on our environment. 

Certain versions have had glitches in the past but they've usually been fixed or patched within a matter of days. One such instance was RAM scaling over 160GB on certain VMs for no apparent reason. 

10/10. They've been quick to respond each time we need help with a new feature or we notice something odd. 

Turbonomic essentially pays for itself in the first 30 days of use. Can completely replace an operations team for maintaining a healthy environment. 

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.

It has a feature called "right-sizing". This makes sure that our virtual machines are sized properly so we don't have a lot of wasted resources, either too large or too small. This way, our machines function much better than they should.

We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need.

The solution handles some of our applications and cloud as well as giving us some insight into the storage aspect. While we have other tools, Turbonomic does give me insight onto my storage utilization as well. That part helps us with the virtualization stack. Turbonomic understands the resource relationships at each of these layers and the risks to performance for each of them, which helps us be a little more at the front of the game, giving us a little more insights to be more ahead of what we need to do.

To an extent, the solution helps manage our business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources. Some of our business-critical apps are our large virtualization stacks, and that is what our developers develop on. These keep our development environment running optimally so they can continue to develop without having to wait for resources.

It does suggest actions. It let us know ahead of time: 

• If we need to increase hardware.
• If we're okay.
• If we need to decrease hardware.
• What to expect during peak season.

The most valuable feature is the right-sizing. For my maintenance weekend, I can schedule it to right-size a subset of VMs every month. That works perfectly for me. It goes out on its own and tells me which machines need to be changed, then it will perform that function. I don't have to do any manual intervention. It runs its own report in the background. 

Turbonomic tells me ahead of time to prevent resource starvation. Going into the console, it tells me whether actions can be taken, saying, "Do you want to do these now?" Then, I can push a button and Turbonomic will do them. Or, I could simulate a load by saying, "Well, I'm going to add this, what will happen?" It will then tell me what will happen, so I can know ahead of time.

It optimizes application performance as a continuous process that is beyond human scale.

The solution helps us with troubleshooting issues in certain virtual environments. It gives you good information so you can drill down to different levels. You can get information to help you troubleshoot issues that you are seeing, whether it be storage-related or virtual machine-related.

They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date.

They could update the look of the console.

There are some manual issues. When it comes to forecasting dollar amounts, you have to put in all these inputs. Some of the questions they ask are a little outside of the realm that any engineer should be putting in. If they could streamline that, the solution would be much better.

I have been using it for about two and a half years.

It is very stable. I don't think it has ever gone down unless it was something that we did. If you have a good system that is sized properly, then it works well.

The solution doesn't require any maintenance on our side.

We schedule for change windows because a lot of the times the recommended changes will require a restart. So, we have to do them when they don't affect anybody. For a lot of what we are using Turbonomic, it will suggest actions that require restarts, shutdowns, etc. Those need to be done off-hours.

It scales well. If you need to scale up, you just purchase more licenses.

We have 6,500 endpoints, which are 95 percent virtual and five percent cloud.

We have our operations team who use it sometimes. Operations gets the first call about performance improvements. If someone calls or opens a ticket with them, and says, "Oh, I need more resources," then they will log onto Turbonomic and see if a machine is underperforming for whatever reason. 

My team is managing the resources for right-sizing and forecasting,

We learned that all we have to do is engage the Turbonomic team, and they will help us get anything that we need done. They will make feature improvements if we request them. They are proactive when working with us.

Previously, we used something out-of-the-box or homegrown, in-house scripts.

Upgrading the solution is straightforward. It is pretty easy.

When we are notified of an upgrade, feature pack, or patch, it is like a two or three step function to get to the next level. It is very non-intrusive and easy. It takes 35 to 40 minutes to upgrade or apply a patch, and the solution doesn't go down.

We keep it because we see ROI. For example, I had an issue recently, which was big, and Turbo helped me solve that problem. If we did not have this solution, it would have been a much bigger issue.

It has reduced our IT-related CapEx and OpEx, because you have a lot of people who complain that they need this and that. Those would be capital expenditures if we're buying more machines, and we really don't need them. So, we can just right-size a VM or an environment, and that pays for the capital and operational expenditures. The automation helps a lot with this as well. This has reduced our expenditures around 10 percent because I haven't bought anything in a while. I haven't needed to buy anything, except for replacements.

It has saved time. Without this application, I would have to do everything myself. That would take at least eight hours a month, because the right-sizing takes a couple hours, then I would have to prepare it.

It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive.

We tested Turbonomic against VMware vROps. Both solutions will tell you, "Oh, you should do this or that. This is an issue. You can do this." However, at the time that we tested vROps, it was an older version. They weren't offering the ability to schedule right-sizing and automating it, where Turbonomic does. vROps would just alert you, so you would have to do the right-sizing yourself. Therefore, vROps would have been a bit more manual with more operational needs.

I target it at the cloud to get a baseline against other tools, e.g., which ones we are going to go with long-term. Turbonomic, in our cloud, points towards development environments, not production environments.

We are not really application-specific. However, it does work well with the monitoring and ensuring performance. I can identify a performance issue just by opening the dashboard, even if I am not necessarily looking for one.

I would give it an eight (out of 10). It is a really good product.

I'm using this solution to get performance stats outside of my vCenter environment.

I have the ability to automate things similar to the Orchestrator stuff. I do have the ability to have it do some balancing, and if it sees some different performance metrics that I've set not being met, it'll actually move some of my virtual machines from, let's say, one host to another. It is sort of an automation tool that helps me. Basically, I specify the metric, and if I get a certain host or something being over-utilized, it'll automatically move the virtual machines around for me. It basically has to snap into my vCenter and then it can make adjustments and move my virtual machines around.

It also has some very nice reporting tools built around virtual machines. It tells you how much storage, memory, or CPU is being used monthly, and then it gives you a very nice way to be able to send out billing structure to your end users who use servers within your environment.

It sometimes does get false positives. Sometimes, it'll move something when it really wasn't a performance metric. I've seen it do that, but it's pretty much an automated tool for performance. We've only got about 500 virtual machines, so lots of times, I'm able to manage it physically, but it's definitely a nice tool for a larger enterprise that might be managing 2,000 or 3,000 virtual machines.

I've been using Turbonomic for about three years.

I haven't had a problem yet with an update. I've updated it three or four times over the last two years, and the machine has been stable. I haven't had any crashes. It has been doing as what's expected, and upgrades are pretty straightforward.

They do the upgrades quarterly, but I really haven't seen any bugs out of it that I would report back in. They're pretty sufficient at doing their beta testing before they release a major release. I usually wait about a month until they've released a major release.

It probably does have a lot of scalability. I'm a pretty small shop compared to some of the users who use this product, but I'm sure it scales out. From what I can tell, no matter how much I grew, it would still scale to my environment. Now, I can't speak about somebody who has 10,000 virtual machines out on the cloud and things of that nature, but it does allow me to facilitate cloud virtual machines outside of my environment if I had any.

I've had to deal with them probably mid-summer just with a couple of questions, and they were very responsive. I have no issues with them. I usually get a call back for assistance within an hour.

We really didn't have another product. We were licensed for vRealize, but we never actually spun it up, and then we saw Turbonomic. Our big reason for going for it was a lot of reporting functionality and the resource metrics that I can pull back to be able to bill customers. vRealize and Orchestrator are okay, but they don't have a lot of billing functionality in them to create reports and send automatically to end users or to do things of that nature. The management feature was nice, but the biggest reason for purchasing it was its ability to run reports and run billing outside of our VMware environment.

It was very straightforward. It was basically just an OVA appliance that I brought up, licensed, and then gave it permission to be able to talk to my vCenter. Boom, everything was out there and running. You could actually write custom reports in it and do things of that nature. Its setup was very easy.

There are only a couple of us who actually handle the updates. It is mostly used by my network administrators. There are about ten of us who actually use the tool to make adjustments in our VMware environment. It's pretty much just my VMware administrators who utilize the tool.

It was an annual buy-in. You basically purchase it based on your host type stuff. The buy-in was about 20K, and the annual maintenance is about $3,000 a year.

I would recommend this product to others depending on what their need is and the size of their environment. I like what I've seen at this point, but it might not be the perfect fit for certain environments, but I would recommend it.

They constantly have quarterly webinars for their new releases, new functionality, and some of the new things they're doing. They do four major upgrades per year, but I probably use the tool to about 30% of its capacity. It probably has a lot more whistles and bells that I haven't even taken advantage of.

I would rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten.