IBM Turbonomic Reviews

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.

Dashboard. Quick way to monitor the vCenter.

Improve Overall efficiency dashboard has identified resource consumption by individual VM's either to much or not enough.

Tuning VM's to the correct resource consumption, memory or CPU, has provided a true snapshot of the environments "foot print". This has aided in the correct sizing of physical machines needed to support the environment.

Definitions/descriptions of what each chart means. The line graph looks good, but doesn't mean anything without prior knowledge of what a "good UI" number is for example. I have a server with host UI of 26.7, both desired and current. I guess that is good. I see the definition of what UI is, but I'm not sure what to do if I'm not running optimal. I let Turbonomic suggest, and optimize, but still have double digit UI.

2 years

I was told to use the Chrome or Firefox browser because it works better. I don't know if that has been fixed with the later versions of both Turbonomic and Internet Explorer. I still use Chrome to use this product.

None noted.

I rate customer service as a 10/10. I've not had any issues when dealing with support or sales team.

Technical support has aided me one time, and I am totally satisfied. Quick and correct resolution.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Tech support aided in the install, and then provided training. The install and setup is straightforward.

VMturbo support/presales team installed via remote desktop.

VMware Operations Manager.

The Turbonomic solution works/performs as advertised. It automatically removes a large workload in the day to day care of my virtual environment.

Turbonomic has some very useful features like being able to link multiple clusters together to for a super cluster allow us to balance out our load as needed. We also have started using the automation available in Turbonomic to automate some of our workloads that have been virtualized.

From a engineer perspective the ability to automate and show what is being used and what is really needed has helped us gain traction with virtualization. Also allowing application teams to login to Turbonomic and scope them to their servers has been a very valuable tool for us.

I think the UI could be cleaned up some which I know they are working on. I have seen the demo and it looks good from what I have seen so far. Also reporting needs to be worked on, the lack of ability to edit a report has been a challenge. Also vROps has better canned reports.

2 years now.

Deployment is almost two easy. We have been working through challenges with the storage module but support continues to push through that to find out what my real issue is there.

Product has been stable since the install.

None.

Customer service has been amazing, the guys on the tech teams have been available and helpful every time we have had an issue.

Very good technical support.

vCOPS

Install is almost to easy and the tool is up and running in no time.

We installed the appliance.

Turbonomic keeps our cluster balanced and VMs running optimally. It shows us where in our environment that resources can be recovered as well as when extra is needed.

Monthly reporting is more detailed now and we can see where improvements can be made within the environment.

The ability to automate moving of VMs, Capacity Planning and Reporting have been invaluable to our monthly reporting.

None at the moment.  The product is improving with each release and the new HTML5 interface is great.  Would like to see the ability to move custom dashboards from the old interface to the new as that is not possible right now.

Three to five years.

Product has been very stable and updating works very well.

No issues with scalability as the VM when deployed is provisioned well for your environment.

Customer Service:

Customer Service/Sales I would rate as 10 out of 10. Sales was tremendous in helping me sell the solution to Management for purchasing.

Technical Support:

Technical Support has not been engaged as of yet.

Positive

Other solutions were evaluated during this time, but nothing was being used.

Setup is very straightforward and you have data within hours, not days or weeks.

It was implemented in-house by myself.

ROI will be approximately six months once we receive our license for the full product.

Contact Sales about pricing and licensing as they will work with you on the best solution.

Yes, other solutions were evaluated: vCOPS, Uila, and Opvizor.

The sales team was amazing in helping put together a slide deck for me to sell the solution to Management and also were able to negotiate pricing within our budget to help get us on-board.

Capacity reporting features.

This product has allowed us to see how dense we can make our ESXi clusters.

Reporting on powered down VMs.

Six months.

No.

Yes.

No.

10 out of 10.

On a scale of one to 10 it's been a 5.

No.

Straightforward. Deploy an OVA.

Vendor team, good level of expertise.

Capacity planning, migration planning, consolidation of our environment.

Speak with your account manager.

Yes, vROps.

N/A

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.

Automated sizing and moves for VMs based on real-time usage statistics.

Capacity planning for purchasing new hardware.

It has freed up space on our VMware hosts to allow optimized utilization of our resources.

The only area of improvement that I can think of is re-sizing recommendations are not able to be based upon working hours of a day or typical load times. So you have a VM that gets pounded from 7am - 4pm, but then pretty much goes dormant. Turbonomic makes its recommendation over a 24-hour period, not during time windows you can specify. You do, however, have the option to restrict automated resizing actions within a certain window (so Turbonomic doesn't resize during peak times). I just wish there was a way to base resizing recommendations during a snapshot window instead of a 24-hour period.

Two years and just renewed for a third.

No issues at all, was pretty straightforward to get up and running. Plus the support team was nothing short of excellent!

No issues at all.

None.

10-plus. Everyone at Turbonomic we've worked with has been top-notch and extremely knowledgeable about their product.

10-plus, same as above!

No we did not. Found Turbonomic at a conference and was impressed with their solution and ran with it.

Straightforward, extremely user friendly.

In-house.

I don't have a dollar number handily available, but as mentioned before it has definitely freed up server resources, giving us space back on our hosts.

Reach out to the Turbonomic team directly and work with your local rep so that you can get the best solution/pricing available to you.

We didn't evaluate any other vendors.

If you're looking for a solution to give you a deeper dive into how your VM environment is being utilized and to provide some optimization; then you can't go wrong with Turbonomic!

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.