IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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.

We have found the automation for moving VMs optimally to be much better than VMware DRS. We have also rebalanced our storage platform using the recommended storage moves. This has improved performance and capacity use across hosts and storage.

Cluster Capacity Dashboards have been a huge benefit towards capacity planning and scaleout reviews

The planner element of the product is fantastic for host replacement planning and allowing the rightsizing of our disaster recovery (DR) provisioning.

We now have a more robust capacity request process within the department, and over the past 18 months, we have put on hold a scale out of physical hosts at both our primary datacenter and DR. This has saved the trust 1000s in new hosts and more than paid for the solution many times over.

The planner can be complex to complete.

Three years.

No issues.

No issues.

No issues.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager was our previous product. This solution was slow, overly complex and its impact limited in terms of what it was capable of doing.

Very straightforward and the technical team walked us through all we needed to configure.

In-house, as it was very straightforward.

This year, we have probably saved around £24,000 on new host scaleouts.

We pay a subscription model, which more than pays for itself each year.

Yes, we used SolarWinds Virtualization Manager.

As a manager of a large complex critical healthcare infrastructure, this product has been a huge benefit to me and my team. It is the go to solution for troubleshooting and decision-making regarding our VMware-based datacenters.

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.

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

The reporting and planning features are used a lot and contribute to our ROI. But we have only touched the tip of the iceberg with the product, currently utilizing the recommendation function to get more comfortable before moving to automation of manual processes.

In the past, used multiple products to monitor CPU, memory utilization, or find virtual machine using large snapshots on datastores. We can look in one place throughout the day or get daily reports alerting us at the start of the day.

Built-in, context-sensitive Help would be useful. Much more intuitive personal dashboard designing would be nice.

One year at present company and three-plus years at previous company.

No, or it was already in place.

Product has proven to be pretty stable.

Ran into a snafu with a database during an upgrade, support was knowledgeable and on top of the issue quickly and resolved it as quickly.

Always helpful.

Nothing but good things to say about tech support, always quick to respond back and I always feel like I got the A-team working with me on my issue.

Manually monitoring and manipulating resources, and grabbing reports from multiple sources. Switching made it easy to do all of the above.

Pretty straightforward.

In house.

For me the ROI is measured in the amount of time I save not searching around for information. Being able to produce reports to show customers why they don't need as much resources as they think, money saved.

Talk to your sales rep.

The economic algorithm is a brilliant way to measure supply vs. demand of virtual machine resource needs. It is this idea that makes Turbonomic perform better than the rest.

We use it to keep our virtual landscape balanced and bottleneck free. When we enabled automatic guest balancing within Turbonomic, our complaints about slow VM's dropped over 90%.

They need an updated UI - perhaps HTML5? The dashboard could use a cosmetic update.

Several years.

No, it deployed and worked flawlessly.

No, it's there whenever we need to login.

We've had a few issues upgrading and getting things working the way would we like, but Turbonomic has been very supportive to allocate knowledgeable resources to address them quickly.

Great. Turbonomic knows what it can do - and what it can't.

We used built in tools to try and balance workloads - it wasn't as good.

Initial setup is fairly straightforward. We deployed a virtual machine - configured it to our vCenters - and that was pretty much it.

We did the intial deployment in house - we've had Turbonomic onsite to help us tune the product to our specifications.

The ROI has been unquantifiable. The tools within the product have been great for our administrative team. I recommend the product highly.

Pricing has changed considerably since we purchased the product several years ago.

No

If you need a product that can automate workload balancing, capacity planning, reporting of resource use - Turbonomic is a fantastic choice.

Automation of tasks to keep the resources loads on my ESX servers balanced. The reporting functions also save me a lot of leg work when requests are made from those higher up about over environment performance and trends.

It keeps resources loads balanced with in my ESX clusters. Also the information about scaling up or scaling down machines is very useful as I am able to properly increase or decrease resources for virtual machines. We are more efficient and once again the reporting allows us to get pertinent data quickly.

There are a lot preconfigured reports that can be ran within Turbonomics for some of the more common information needed. To do a custom report you have to create a SQL Query string and add it as a report to gather custom information. It would be nice to have the ability to choose the contents of the reports from within the web portal as opposed to getting one from the user community or writing it yourself.

Personally, close to a year, but my company has been utilizing it for around 2 years.

No, and the upgrade process was also very easy.

Not scaling out at this point.

Account reps have been great and very engaging.

Need for technical support has been minimal.

No.

It was originally deployed before my employment, but I did do redeployment and the process was very simple.

In house.

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!