IBM Turbonomic Reviews

Provides automation of the workloads to the best hosts and trending of resource capacity over time. We constantly focus on this as a service provider.

We have a relatively small team for these tasks. We want to ensure that we have automation to provide our clients with the best experience, as well as reducing our overall labor. These factors are critical to our success.

The user interface is quite dated. There is a new UI release on the horizon and some of the new UI elements are in the newest version. It would also be good to have an overview of the environment of improvements. In addition, VMtools out of date, as are the phantom files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were no deployment issues.

There were no stability issues.

No scalability issues,so far and we have 20 hosts.

I would give customer service a rating of 9/10.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

We used vMan from SolarWinds. We wanted a product that enabled more automation of tasks and intelligent load balancing.

The setup was straightforward. You simply install the OVA, set the IP, and plug it into your Vcenter.

We did the implementation in-house.

We have been seeing a 4-6 month time window where we have been able to extend before procurement of additional hosts which have been required.

Alongside the additional labor, we save approximately $4500/month.

Ensure that you do a multi-year agreement to get the best discounts.

We looked at vMan and vROps.

VM automation to keep clusters' performance at its best.

Keeps clusters aligned, compute wise. We also use the planning and forecasting tools to determine needs.

Planning tools could be easier to use. Depending on your needs, it can be time consuming to get what you want.

A few years now.

No.

Every so often, and it usually needs a reboot to recover.

Not yet.

Customer success team is awesome. Sometimes the support team can take a long time to respond.

Good, but slow at times. If it's a really hot issue we can usually get a quick response though, after escalation.

Native VMware tools.

Easy.

In-house.

More of a cost avoidance for us, meaning that it saves us from over-provisioning and allows more density.

Yes.

The Turbonomics team is always looking for ways to improve their product. They are also willing to engage the customer success team to help us find new ways or easier ways to get more from the product. This is refreshing in a world where, after purchase, you are usually on your own after installing, other than support. That is not the case with this team.

The customizable dashboard lets us get quick insight into our environment. The quick overview of your environment allows you to get to fixing the things that matter most quickly.

It allows us to plan accordingly for any future growth.

There needs to be a way to permanently ignore certain alerts, such as if you have a server where you know the HDD space is low but also know it's never going to grow any to tell it to always ignore that one. Also email alerts for HDD space do not seem to exist, or if they do they aren't working properly or they aren't self explanatory to setup.

About a year.

No, we did not have any deployment issues

No issues with stability

Customer service is top notch, the product demos and trial we got early on were very helpful.

We haven't had to use tech support yet but I'm sure they are fantastic

We did use Virtualization Manager before and it didn't seem near as robust as Turbonomic and it was more expensive so we switched.

Setup was very easy.

We implemented it with the help of VMTurbo team.

This is an overall great and easy to use product and has been very helpful in our organization, definitely recommend it!

We looked to this product to help us to right-size our virtual machines and containers. Most people who request virtual machines tend to request more resources than they need, and most of the time it's hard to prove that they don't.

Our environment is entirely on-premises. We have virtual machines and Kubernetes running on some of those VMs. We also have plans to go to the cloud with some workloads in the future, so it's good to have this tool to help get the sizing just right when the time comes to pull the plug.

Turbonomic has been helping us use our resources more efficiently, the challenge we currently face internally is getting people to allow the servers to be turned off to make the changes recommended.

I also like the planning tool, which is helpful to make sure we have enough capacity for failing over one datacenter to the other in case of disaster, while still maximizing what we already have and helping to keep us from making host purchases we don't need yet. It's nice not having to make all those calculations on my own.

At the moment, I have only really had the opportunity to manage virtual machines with it.

We're starting to let it look at our Kubernetes workloads as well.

The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be. However, I haven't reached that point yet. That is the plan for the future though.

I really like the planning tool so I can make sure we have enough resources for upcoming projects that require servers, while still having enough resources for our disaster recovery failover needs.

The reporting feature could be made a little more seamless with the rest of the tool. It would be nice to be able to share and print the reports a little more easily.

Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI.

The upgrade process is a bit tedious, but I know the team is working on that.

The ability to set the scope at the dashboard level and let it flow down to all the widgets you add would be amazing. Having to select the scope per widget is a bit tedious.

We have been using Turbonomic for just under a year.

It is pretty stable, we have not had issues with that.

Turbonomic seems scalable to me.

Technical support is where Turbonomic shines.

Lots of features are still in the works but the company really makes sure you have a lot of attention and support after the sale, which is sometimes hard to get. Most of the time, once a vendor has your money, you never hear from them again. However, I have had a great experience with post-sales support and a lot of hand-holding.

It is really well done on their part to make their customer happy.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Deployed was completed in-house.

We have no ROI so far.

It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it.

We evaluated VMware vROps before selecting Turbonomic.

Turbonomic is hyper-visor agnostic, so we use it to monitor both our VMware and XenServer environments. It helps identify when a virtual machine needs additional resources or to be migrated to another host. The migration we allow to happen automatically. However, changing resources we look at the recommendation and may or may not take the suggestion for various reasons. 

Due to the loss of our primary VMware administrator, my colleagues had to take over managing the virtual environment. There were settings for various reservations set at one of our locations. Although memory/CPU may have been increased at some point on these systems, it was not until Turbonomic recommended increasing the reservations that we realized these settings were in place.

More recently, we have used it in planning data center upgrades. It allowed us to determine how many additional blades we may need due to upcoming projects. We built a template on the new model of blades we were considering, and of the new SAP HANA VM's we were going to be needing. It provided a plan of how many blades we would need to add to the environment to accommodate this expansion, which allowed for more accurate budget planning. 

When you log in to Turbonomic, I find the Assure Service Performance that appears on the dashboard the most useful item. This option shows virtual machines that may need additional memory, CPU, or to be migrated to other storage to ensure performance. The product can be configured to do all of this automatically, but I like have more control of the changes. Plus, the way we have our storage configured, it is best that one of the admins selects which data store a machine is migrated to. I also like the reporting feature and have several of them set to automatically generate and email to me at the end of the month. One in particular shows snapshots that are still on the virtual machines. This prevents forgotten snapshots from existing for weeks, months, or even years.

Based on the way we currently use the product I do not have any recommended improvements. However, we do not have may of the automated features configured at this time.

Three to five years.

No issues with stability.

There have been no issues with scalability. Currently, it is used to monitor several hypervisor environments including XenServer, VMware, VXRail, etc.

Customer Service:

The customer service has always been very responsive and friendly.

Technical Support:

Technical support responds quickly and always keeps you updated on any issues that may require some research. One of the processes is uploading or exporting a copy of your current environment. This gives support a copy of your environment to try to replicate a problem, if needed.

We previously had vCOPS, but that was charged per VM and could not monitor and report on our XenServer environment.

Setup is relatively straightforward. There is a template to deploy and configure the initial IP address. After that, the rest of the configuration is performed through the web GUI. This includes adding various environments, setting up reports, configuring actions, etc.

Since we were an early adopter, the deployment was performed with in-house staff on a WebEx with Turbonomiocs, although it is simple enough that you do not really need assistance with it.

The ROI would mainly be less time troubleshooting performance issues within the various virtual environments. Since we have a mixed environment, any issues that may impact performance appear on one dashboard, regardless of the environment. This saves the team a lot of time.

The pricing is fairly straightforward. It is based on the number of physical CPUs. There is now an option for per VM pricing. This can be valuable if you are monitoring VM's in a Cloud environment. 

No, but as mentioned before we did have vCOPS and chose this as a replacement.

I highly recommend this product, particularly if you have a heterogeneous virtual environment.

• Moving VMs
• Storage moves in conjunction with DRS
• The planning function
• Rightsizing VMs

We used Turbonomic to plan our hardware refresh, and it was right on the money. Now, we are using it to plan VM moves to the cloud.

This is more of a feature request than a need for improvement. I would like to be a able to track growth over time by cluster and be able to define the clusters to use for enterprise summary. I would also like to be able to get an enterprise summary from the aggregator appliance.

Six years.

If you can download a Virtual Desk Machine (VMDK) file and assign it an IP, you can deploy Turbonomic in minutes.

Turbonomic has been very stabile.

None.

Customer Service:

Turbonomic provides excellent customer service. They are very responsive.

Technical Support:

One of the best technical support groups out of all of our vendors. They are very responsive.

Download OVF file, then configure the IP, enter your VC credentials, and boom, you are done. Just one virtual appliance.

In-house.

12 months.

vROPs.

You should at least try this out. The install is simple and the product is intuitive. What other solution is capable of showing you an issue, recommending a solution, and making the necessary changes to resolve the issue?

• Assure service performance
• Policy/automation
• Plan/capacity planning
• Application module
• Network module

Assure Service Performance: This feature is useful, because it gives us insightful information (similar to ESXTOP, but minus all the analysis) about a virtual machine (VM), whether it is over-provisioned or under-provisioned. The recommendations help us maintain a well-balanced virtual environment.

Policy/Automation: We set up a policy of automatically adding more vCPUs to the VMs based on Turbonomic's recommendation and continuous monitoring. This feature serves a dual-purpose for us: alleviate administrative tasks for our sysadmins and help maintain the highest performance in our VMs.

Plan: It is a great tool for capacity planning. It helps to eliminate all the guesses and gives us a good idea of the hardware specs we will need for future expansion.

Application/Network Module: Another great features that we use in our environment to help autoscale our application servers, so they are performing smoothly and fluidly with minimal intervention.

It would be helpful to have the option to display the target(s) by their host name instead of their IP address. Also, hopefully Turbonomic will continue to increase supports for more target types (vendors).

For me, a bit over a year. However, our team has been using it for years.

It has been a while, and I forgot. If there were any issues, they were probably very minimal. Otherwise, it was pretty straightforward.

Nothing so far.

No.

It has been excellent.

It has been excellent.

We were using both Veeam and VMTurbo at one point, but it was management's decision to go with VMTurbo.

It wasn't too complex.

Vendor team. They were knowledgeable and the deployment was pretty smooth.

Not applicable.

Not applicable.

Veeam.

There are three main areas that that we find priceless. The automation, planning/forecasting and reporting.

The reporting has allowed us to quickly evaluate our VM infrastructure and where we stand on a day to day basis. The planning/forcasting feature has allowed us to plan for additional hardware. At times, it has saved us lots of money when we did not need to purchase additional hardware even though we thought we would.

The new HTML5 version is not as user friendly as I had hoped.

We've had Turbonomic deployed for about 12 months now - plus the initial trial period.

Deployment was very straightforward. Transition from trial to fully licensed was just as simple

Turbonomic has been very stable. Honestly, we forget it's even running, until we need to look at a report or have growth/expansion plans for our infrastructure.

No, we have not. Initially we used it for our Production Cluster but have recently expanded it to our SQL Cluster without issue.

They are fast, polite and knowledgable.

They are on par with customer service; fast, polite and knowledgable.

No, we did not use anything beforehand.

Straightforward with no issues.

implemented in-house.

It has saved us from buying lots of hardware that we would have bought if it weren't for Turbonomic. The planning/forcasting tool is the most valuable feature. This feature alone will pay for itself because it saves you from purchasing unneeded hardware in the first year alone.

The pricing is very competitive and much cheaper than VMware.

VMware Operations Manager.

Any company with a virtual infrastructure should have Turbonomic.