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.
"Turbonomic can show us if we're not using some of our storage volumes efficiently in AWS. For example, if we've over-provisioned one of our virtual machines to have dedicated IOPs that it doesn't need, Turbonomic will detect that and tell us."
"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."
"With over 2500 ESX VMs, including 1500+ XenDesktop VDI desktops, hosted over two datacentres and 80+ vSphere hosts, firefighting has become something of the past."
"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."
"Turbonomic helps us right-size virtual machines to utilize the available infrastructure components available and suggest where resources should exist. We also use the predictive tool to forecast what will happen when we add additional compute-demanding virtual machines or something to the environment. It shows us how that would impact existing resources. All of that frees up time that would otherwise be spent on manual calculation."
"With Turbonomic, we were able to reduce our ESX cluster size and save money on our maintenance and license renewals. It saved us around $75,000 per year but it's a one-time reduction in VMware licensing. We don't renew the support. The ongoing savings is probably $50,000 to $75,000 a year, but there was a one-time of $200,000 plus."
"We have seen a 30% performance improvement overall."
"Using this product helps us to reduce performance risk because it shows us where resources are needed but not yet allocated."
"It gives the real-time info that we need to diagnose any problems that we have with our VDI infrastructure."
"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."
"We use the product to minimize downtime, as well as be in a position to plan for future growth."
"Through the trending analysis that we can do, it allowed us to quickly and easily right-size the capacity from a cluster."
"All our capacity management and capacity planning processes are based on vROps. Without this tool, we are unable to predict what we need, at what time we need to purchase new hardware, whether we should upgrade, etc."
"The solution gives suggestions regarding whether resources are underutilized or overutilized."
"The initial setup is quite easy and straightforward. The majority of the time, implementing vROps is not time-consuming."
"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."
"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."
"It would be nice for them to have a way to do something with physical machines, but I know that is not their strength Thankfully, the majority of our environment is virtual, but it would be nice to see this type of technology across some other platforms. It would be nice to have capacity planning across physical machines."
"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."
"I do not like Turbonomic's new licensing model. The previous model was pretty straightforward, whereas the new model incorporates what most of the vendors are doing now with cores and utilization. Our pricing under the new model will go up quite a bit. Before, it was pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and reasonable."
"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."
"It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring softwares. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic."
"The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"There are some metrics that are not included in the canned set, that we've created. They call them super metrics in the tool, where you create your own metric. But the super metrics are not really reliable. It might be because we didn't create them correctly, although we did have help from VMware. They also don't translate into newer versions like a canned metric would. One of them is a vCPU to pCPU ratio. That's one that is missing, which should be very simple for them to collect."
"One of the features I would like them to bring in is more application monitoring and more visibly into applications. Instead of the actual hardware and the environment, they need to go one step further and bring in application availability and application performance. I don't really care if the hardware's overloaded, as long as the application is performing correctly. That's all the users care about and that's all I really care about."
"We are looking to optimize all the parts. For example, vCenter can be fully deployed automatically, which is not the case with vROps. We can click some next buttons to integrate vCenter and would like these type of features for vROps, if possible."
"If I had a container solution deployed on top of a VMware infrastructure, or outside as well, it would be really helpful."
"It requires a lot of knowledge to manage. For example, if you are collecting a lot of data for analysis, the virtual appliance drive spaces can fill up. In this case, you need engineers who know how to expand those spaces."
"One thing I mentioned when speaking with the engineers is that we'd like to get more granular reporting. We'd like to see more real-time reporting on the application-process level. Right now, we don't get that. For example, if I have a VM that's spiking up on memory or CPU, I can't really drill down to the application level and say, "Hey, I have IE that's spiking due to the user's streaming of video and that's affecting their entire session." vROps doesn't do that."
"It can be user-friendly once you get the dashboard set up but it can be complicated to get the information you want, the way you want it. Finally, if there were an easier way to share dashboards, that would be a big one."
"It would break, and you would have to go fix it. Then it would break, and they would have some other guys that knew a bit more about it, and they fixed it."
IBM Turbonomic is ranked 4th in Cloud Management with 204 reviews while VMware Aria Operations is ranked 2nd in Cloud Management 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 Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth, VMware vSphere and Cloudability, whereas VMware Aria Operations is most compared with VMware Aria Automation, VMware vSphere, Veeam ONE, Nutanix Prism and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our IBM Turbonomic vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
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