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 has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately."
"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."
"It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, 'This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level.' It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, 'Apply these resizes,' and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I like the analytics that help us optimize compatibility. Whereas Azure Advisor tells us what we have to do, Turbonomic has automation which actually does those things. That means we don't have to be present to get them done and simplifies our IT engineers' jobs."
"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."
"This solution is most definitely scalable. We've already gone back to the drawing board and specifically designed it from the ground up, to be scalable with the size of our environment moving forward."
"The scalability is great. With vRealize Operations Manager, we are able to create remote collection nodes if we feel that it's too intensive for the current deployment. The remote collection nodes allow us to collect more metrics from other sources."
"It has allowed me to give the developers insight into what's actually happening underneath the covers. They used to only be able to see their app and now, they can see underneath. We've also given them access to see into the OS and we've given them a full stack view of how their application is performing."
"It has increased the speed of VM deployment. A normal server request would come in, it could take anywhere from three to four days to deploy and now within 15 minutes they can click and have something up and running. IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."
"The reports: Print any kind of reports or generate them, and send them to somebody if they say my VM is going very slow."
"The scalability is great. We have never had any issues with it being unable to size properly in our environment."
"Scalability is relatively simple. You just spin up a new appliance and you either add it to an existing vROps manager or you can create a new environment. You can forward statistics. If I have multiple data centers, I can spin up remote nodes and send our information back to our primary one."
"Based on those usage patterns, we can determine when our best maintenance times are and when we need to scale things up or down."
"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."
"Turbonomic doesn't do storage placement how I would prefer. We use multiple shared storage volumes on VMware, so I don't have one big disk. I have lots of disks that I can place VMs on, and that consumes IOPS from the disk subsystem. We were getting recommendations to provision a new volume."
"The GUI and policy creation have room for improvement. There should be a better view of some of the numbers that are provided and easier to access. And policy creation should have it easier to identify groups."
"Additional interfaces would be helpful."
"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 old interface was not the clearest UI in some areas, and could be quite intimidating when first using the tool."
"Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI."
"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."
"It's a little bit scattered. I have to go through a lot of steps to get everything in one place. I would like it that if you click on one cluster, you get all the information from the host, VMs, whatever is there. Sometimes I have to go to different places to get the information."
"vROps is, by its nature, a very complex product."
"Moving forward, I would like to see some tighter integration with the vSphere Web Client, just so that I don't have to open multiple windows and jump back and forth. We've currently running vSphere 6.7 and there is a lot tighter integration between vROps and vSphere, but it can always be better."
"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."
"We integrated vROps with vRealize Log Insight, but it was not helpful to me. It was not giving me any good data."
"I wouldn't say that this solution is user-friendly. You need to know a lot of tricks to know how to use it. It's quite buggy and quite slow when it comes to loading."
"The only problem we have is monitoring of the disk space used by the program."
"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."
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, Nutanix Prism, Veeam ONE and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager. See our IBM Turbonomic vs. VMware Aria Operations report.
See our list of best Cloud Management vendors and best Virtualization Management Tools vendors.
We monitor all Cloud Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
