IBM Turbonomic Reviews

The most important feature to us is an objective measurement of VM headroom per cluster. In addition, the ability to check for the right-sizing of VMs.

We have been able to recover significant headroom by utilizing Turbonomic's measurements. Moreover, there is no need for any in-house reporting to check capacity.

Turbonomic's product is the best I have seen at calculating headroom when compared with our original in-house calculations. However, the current versions do not split out headroom by component nor do they indicate where the capacity bottleneck lies (e.g. CPU, memory, or storage).

We have been using this product for close to a year now.

Deployment was very smooth and we are not even using the appliance. We are using the application on RHEL 7.

I have yet to encounter any problems with stability.

We have multiple vCenters so we did have to break out our initial Turbonomic implementation into multiple Turbonomic instances.

Their customer service is very responsive and they have been following up with us since we bought the product.

I get accurate answers quickly. I would have to rate it higher than most support organizations.

We were using an in-house toolset. There were primarily two reasons for the change:

1. Remove the need for special in-house knowledge and development.
2. Use a product that is recognized in the industry to increase transparency and confidence in our capacity calculations.

Very simple. If you can run "yum" and follow a one-page document you can install this product.

We implemented with an in-house team after a week of onsite training at Turbonomic's office.

The break-even point is probably after less than a year. We calculate we will continue to save money year over year by using this product; even more so as we start implementing more features.

You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm.

I have used and tried other products before. Turbonomic is the best for two main reasons: Simplicity and accuracy.

Many products provide tons of information. It's impressive, but superfluous. Turbonomic provides you the information you need - and can provide more - but the dashboards are simple and easy to understand.

The auto resource leveling on my hyper-v cluster saves my staff so much time on monitoring and performance tuning.

Server staff gained 4 hours a week in time they did not have to devote to items other than watching a hyper-v cluster utilization.

This product works well. Only thing I would say is to add tie in with more storage vendors like Nimble.

We have had the solution for 2 years now.

Deployment was very smooth, as have been upgrades.

We have not had any issues with stability of the product or causing unintended crashes of other parts of the virtual systems.

We have not reached the limit scaling yet.

Customer service is excellent.

Can not comment on tech support as we have not needed it.

First and only solution my company has used.

Simple setup that was easy enough for a sales person to do.

Our in-house team implemented the solution in an afternoon.

Payback on staff hours was 4 months.

Get what you need plus enough for another server or two.

We had read about many other products and our thought, based on other peers' experience, was that this was the best solution for the money.

None.

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.

• Plan what-if scenarios
• Reporting
• Real-time evaluation and recommendation of guests

We have been able to use the planning feature to consolidate VMs on few hosts and have been able to show savings of several hundred thousands.

• More insight into the OS and processes rolled into the dashboard natively.
• Add a way to pull metrics from physical servers.

Two years.

No issues experienced.

No stability issues.

The appliance has been able to handle our environment with speedy interface response.

Very proactive in engaging customer for feedback.

I have had no issues in this area.

Yes. The previous solution was used to monitor both physical and virtual environments in one solution. As we became highly virtualized the real-time monitoring and decision-making became important and Turbonomic had an edge over the previous vendor.

Very straightforward. The only downside was we lost history of prior performance.

In-house.

One year.

There are several tiers. Implement the basics, build confidence, and add more as needed.

Yes, vROps.

We are very pleased with how Turbonomic is working out in our environment.

Workload performance analysis.

We have been experiencing VM guest performance issues for months. We tried many things including adding more hardware to no avail. Within a week of running Turbonomic we were able to see clearly which guest systems needed to be resized and, especially, moved to other nodes within our clusters to obtain the optimal performance.

So far the application has been delivering as marketed. Once we can customize our dashboards to our liking, it will be much easier to identify where we need to focus on improving our infrastructure.

Two months.

None.

None.

None.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Dell Foglight.

Very straightforward, we were up and running in less than half an hour.

In-house.

Capacity planning as been most beneficial, as we are looking to upgrade our virtualization infrastructure and now we have a much clearer picture as to what hardware will be needed. I expect the ROI to be immediate as we save on hardware and virtualization license costs.

Licensing is easy to understand when you have an existing environment but determining growth or greenfield implementations may be difficult to get the right amount of licensing.

VMware vRealize.

Great product, can't wait to set to auto drive and let it do its magic.

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.

We first pursued the product some years back for it's capacity planning tools but we find the continuous analysis the most useful. We can spin up new servers without a full understanding of workload values and then keep tabs on it and make adjustments as needed.

We found that if we didn't keep up with some incremental version updates, the required jump to the next version required a complete re-deploy from an image. That's avoidable by keeping up with the incremental updates.

4 years

None.

It's been very reliable.

Not applicable.

Excellent. We largely don't have to touch the product which has lead to us missing out on an occasional feature. Our rep has met with us from time to time specifically to go over things we might be missing. Very handy.

We've had excellent support including some help with getting the most out of the product. We tended to *need* a small portion of what the product can do. That can lead to missing out on neat things it *can* do, and our rep/support helped to point some of these things out for us.

No.

Initial spinup is simple from an image, with some configuration help from support at the time of implementation.

In house.

While our VM clusters are small anyway, it does let us optimize available resources at a per-VM level and keep the cluster small. We are fairly dense (VM:host ratio) and Turbonomic allows for this.

Most valuable to our organisation are the Planning module and the VM Rightsizing Recommendations. The planning module provide a mechanism for us to try out different scenarios based upon expected growth, ensuring that we can meet the capacity demands of our business. The VM Rightsizing Recommendations show us how over or under-utilised our resources are and makes suggestions to improve performance by adding or removing VM resources as needed.

On a daily basis we analyse the recommendations that VMTurbo provides and decide on whether these need to be followed. This ensures that our environment is running at optimal performance, providing the necessary resources that our customers need.

For us there are 2 areas that the product could be improved. Firstly the documentation and help files are not overly intuitive, providing very few examples or details on how to gain the most out of the product. The second area is around reporting. There is easy way to generate customised reports without writing complex SQL queries. A GUI report writer would greatly enhance the product.

We have had this solution in production since November 2013.

No issues were encountered with the deployment of the product.

We have experienced one issue with the product during our time using it. This turned out to be a bug and was promptly resolved as part of a subsequent patch release.

No issues have been encountered with scalability.

The customer service team were very helpful when we needed them. They were knowledgeable at initial call, and promptly got back to us after diagnosis of our problem.

The technical team are very knowledgeable of the product and we would rate their level of service very highly.

No, we did not use any previous solution.

The initial install was very straightforward. We downloaded the package and uploaded to our Virtual Environment. After following a few guided steps, it was completed.

Our implementation was done through an in-house team. No problems were experienced, and the install was well documented and straightforward.

Our ROI can be measured in the amount of server hardware that we have not had to purchase due to using VMTurbo Operations Manager. By following the recommendations of the product, and placing our VMs as recommended we estimate that we have saved ourselves in the region of $50,000+ NZD by not having to purchase at least one additional VM Host.

he original purchase cost was $11,000 USD with a setup cost of approximately $1000 USD (includes engineering time). Ongoing day-to-day costs are negligible, with time spent reading recommendations and a weekly check for updates of the product.

We did evaluate VMware vCentre Operations Manager before choosing VMTurbo Operations Manager, but found it lacked some of the important features that VMTurbo provided.

There are a few parts that I would rate higher than 8, specifically the Planning module, and one that needs more work being the Reporting module. When implementing, we would highly recommend working with the VMTurbo team to undertake some training to get the most out of the product. The documentation is not as good as it could be, so training would be invaluable.