We performed a comparison between IBM Turbonomic and VMware Aria Operations based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
IBM Turbonomic reviewers like its automation and orchestration components and say that it greatly reduces operational expenditures and saves them vast amounts of time by identifying misconfigurations very early on. Some users mention that they would like better generic reports.
VMware Aria Operations users praise its capacity planning feature and say that it is easy to use, is excellent for monitoring, and provides them with valuable insights. Several users say they would like more APIs and integration options.
Comparison Results: IBM Turbonomic comes out on top in this comparison. It is a reasonably priced solution that greatly reduces costs. On the other hand, VMware Aria Operations users say that it is an expensive solution.
"I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance."
"Rightsizing is valuable. Its recommendations are pretty good."
"The feature for optimizing VMs is the most valuable because a number of the agencies have workloads or VMs that are not really being used. Turbonomic enables us to say, 'If you combine these, or if you decide to go with a reserve instance, you will save this much.'"
"The tool provides the ability to look at the consumption utilization over a period of time and determine if we need to change that resource allocation based on the actual workload consumption, as opposed to how IT has configured it. Therefore, we have come to realize that a lot of our workloads are overprovisioned, and we are spending more money in the public cloud than we need to."
"It became obvious to us that there was a lot more being offered in the product that we could leverage to ensure our VMware environment was running efficiently."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"The recommendation of the family types is a huge help because it has saved us a lot of money. We use it primarily for that. Another thing that Turbonomic provides us with is a single platform that manages the full application stack and that's something I really like."
"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."
"It helps an organization quickly create test and dev environments for developers to come up with new software and patch tests."
"It gives me more insight on issues like: Do we need to add more hardware to the clusters; when disks are low, to add more disk space. It's a preventive type of maintenance."
"It gives me metrics that I can share with the rest of my team. I can say, "Look, this server is performing poorly." Even down into the Windows Servers, which are my primary bread and butter, it gives me visibility into situations such as when they're running out of storage and I need to expand the drives. It gives that top-level visibility to get in and fix a lot of problems."
"One of the most valuable features is that it gives us granular insight into how the infrastructure is operating and running, down to the storage level, the hypervisor level, even the hardware level. It really gives us a deep dive into what is going on and lets us see. Instead of our having to figure it out, it figures it out for us. It is also user-friendly and intuitive."
"It allows for a bit more transparency regarding consumption and it also helps us plan ahead."
"What I like most about VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) is how it integrates into the vCenter. You'll get a similar hierarchical view of your host, your VMs, your resource pools, etc. I also like the granularity, particularly the fact that you could go pretty deep into the metrics and data retention as well. You could go far back several months to try and plot performance trends, eventually leading up to an issue or post-incident management. I also like the plugins in VMware vRealize Operations (vROps). I find the plugins good, especially because you could plug those into Dell. For example, there was a way to visualize how your Dell infrastructure is performing. You could build dashboards, even custom dashboards for your operational teams. You could take a look at what was going on and also look into people doing incident management, troubleshooting, etc. You could customize your experience with VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), and I found that good as well. I also like the UI of VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) because it's nice and very, very fresh."
"Our business is built around testing, measurement, and performance measurement and vROps is the primary tool. We use it in a VMware environment and we do tests in other environments. But in the VMware environment, vROps and the associated products, Log Insight and Network Insight are the primary tools that we use. It's a basic tool. It's very important for our organization."
"It tells us when there's an issue with a particular VM or host. It gives us a remediation in order to fix that problem. For example, if there's a shortage of memory or a shortage of CPU, things of that nature, it tells you how to correct that issue."
"If they would educate their customers to understand the latest updates, that would help customers... Also, there are a lot of features that are not available in Turbonomic. For example, PaaS component optimization and automation are still in the development phase."
"There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me."
"I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge."
"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."
"The deployment process is a little tricky. It wasn't hard for me because I have pretty in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes, and their software runs on Kubernetes. To deploy it or upgrade it, you have to be able to follow steps and use the Kubernetes command line, or you'll need someone to come in and do it for you."
"The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens."
"They have a long road map when we ask for certain things that will make the product better. It takes time, but that's understandable because there are other things that are higher on the priority list."
"It can be more agnostic in terms of the solutions that it provides. It can include some other cost-saving methods for the public cloud and SaaS applications as well."
"If I could integrate with vCenter with vROps, then I could execute more things by managing vSphere from within vROps. That would be great."
"I would like to see them bring in metrics for other things in the infrastructure, not just the virtual infrastructure: for example, being able to bring in metrics from my arrays themselves or my fiber channel switches or my ethernet switches. Being able to collect that data would help in being able to lay a holistic view on top of how my entire system is functioning, from the hypervisor all the way down to my end-point."
"VMware could improve the way VROps forwards critical alerts to Microsoft Teams."
"It can get a bit complex when getting into the endpoint monitoring during setup."
"More HTML 5 would also be good. I wish vSphere Client would mirror it. I wish they announced it on day one of 6.7."
"A lot of feedback that we're getting from some of our engineers who are actually using Operations today is that the graphics are very low-key. When it comes to red, yellow, green, yes, "Skittles Theory," but when it actually comes down to what's optimized and what's not optimized, it's very rudimentary. If they could actually make nicer pie charts or graphics involved in it, it would make it a lot easier to read the data on a higher level, rather than actually having to dive down and know specifically what you're looking at."
"An area for improvement would be application-level monitoring."
"I would like to go back in history on the performance data and blank out some of that performance data so that it isn't used in calculations."
IBM Turbonomic is ranked 3rd in Virtualization Management Tools with 204 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 1st in Virtualization Management Tools with 360 reviews. IBM Turbonomic is rated 8.8, while VMware Aria Operations is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Turbonomic writes "The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Operations writes "It has good stability, but the report-generating feature needs improvement". IBM Turbonomic is most compared with Azure Cost Management, Cisco Intersight, VMWare Tanzu CloudHealth, VMware vSphere and Cloudability, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware vSphere, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our IBM Turbonomic vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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