I rate IBM Turbonomic a nine out of ten. Before implementing Turbonomic, you should do your research. Check the documentation to see if Turbonomic's processes make sense for what you're doing and if your current setup will handle all the different aspects of Turbonomic. If your current solution does 85% of what you need, and Turbonomic does 87%, I don't think that's enough to switch products. If your solution meets 80% of your need, and Turbonomic does 98%, why wouldn't you change?

What do you need to do? I can flip a quarter or half-dollars instead of quarters. If all you're doing is flipping dimes, do you need something that flips half-dollars? I'm frugal. I worked for a 501(c)3 nonprofit most of my life before I came to this college.

I look for bang for my buck and stability. I used to describe to other system admins that I may not have the flashiest new Volvo turbo diesel truck that goes up the hills. My Peterbilt with a CAT diesel may smoke and have a little rust on it, but in the middle of a subzero blizzard, it's making that hill while yours is gelled up at the bottom.

Take a long, hard look at the pre-generated reports and how it holistically checks your system from top to bottom through the tree to see if that's a good fit for you. You can't change that tree. If the homepage tree doesn't work for you, then Turbonomic won't work.

There's not much I know you can do to change that. If that tree makes sense to you, then look at the reporting. Look at how it evaluates load balancing based on shares instead of just the overall weight that VMware does. Turbonomic uses market shares.

They turn it into a cost market share to help adjust. It will tell you if a CPU load is heavy. It will give you recommendations to adjust the size. We're not going to move it right away because what is mission-critical is over here, and we don't want to impact that. VMware looks at how heavily the CPU is being utilized in the VM and says, "Well, I'm going to slap that over here," arbitrarily.

Turbonomic has a share you set up. Think of it like stock market shares. That share went up, but it's not a blue-chip stock. We try to move it over to where the blue chip stocks would take a hit. We move it someplace that's a lesser value, so to speak, once machines are of lesser value.

If you're looking into Turbonomic, just do it. You will not regret it.

The biggest thing that I've learned is that you don't realize how much your hardware can do until it's truly balanced. Some people operate foolishly and they just won't step up because they're being cheap. Other people want to be ultra-conservative because they don't ever want to have a problem, but using software like this, you realize that there is a balance. If you trust the software, you get to utilize your hardware better while still feeling like you have those reserves available without putting yourself at risk by being foolish.

It provides a single platform that can manage the full application stacks, but we're not using that aspect. Our developers are not interested in using it yet. We're in the process of looking for a new monitoring software as well, and I'm pushing heavily for them to look at SevOne but we've had some unfortunate experiences with the people at SevOne. If we go down that route and start using SevOne, my boss is going to lean on them much more heavily to start integrating with Turbonomic.

It only handles virtualization right now, for us. It's probably going to start handling cloud soon, because we're just starting to migrate things there. We have some things in the cloud, but we're looking at moving quite a few other servers up to Azure. The solution understands the resource relationships perfectly, on-prem. From what I have seen so far of the cloud piece, it seems to understand that, mostly, although the cloud is still fairly new compared to on-prem infrastructure. I have no doubt that they're going to make huge strides and make that part even better. I don't know that it's as good in the cloud as it is on-prem. We have used it a little bit in some testing, but we haven't run it in production for any long periods of time. But we're really hoping it reduces our cloud cost at some point, because those cloud vendors really take advantage of every ounce of I/O that you use.

Honestly, on a scale of one to 10, I would give Turbonomic a 12. It's way better than a lot of software. Other solutions look really shiny—and if you're like a fish and all you care about is like looking at something shiny, that's one thing—but when those products are delivered, they don't do half of what they say they're going to do. They'll say, "Oh, that's in the next release," or "Oh, we're working on that". Turbonomic was very upfront about what their software did. Yes, they had a few bugs, but they were also just opening at the time. We expected that in the beginning because it was a brand-new company. But what they told you it would do, it did, and it did it well, too. Nowadays, that's hard to find.

We are installing the Kubernetes version of Turbonomic now. Then, it will be able to see application issues when they come up. Once we transitioned to Turbonomic version 8, we will be able to see the application side of things, which we were not able to see before.

Application performance wasn't even something we considered until Turbonomic 8 was announced and revealed to us. This will open a whole new door for us in terms of savings that we probably never even considered in the past.

I am pretty impartial to Turbonomic. I have not used anything to optimize cloud previously, but I'm going to base my rating solely on the support that we have received, the engagements that we had, the attention to detail, and the overall feel of the company and the interactions in the software. I would rate it as a 10 (out of 10).

I rate Turbonomic nine out of 10. It goes into a lot of detail about what you know and your opportunities, but there's always room to improve. 

I rate Turbonomic a ten out of ten. I always tell people about Turbonomic when talking to other infrastructure nerds. When we talk about infrastructure, the crucial part is not the implementation but measuring performance over time to see if your top is spinning out of control or falling over. 

We can typically get it right up front. The big question is: Does it continue to run, or is it slowly running out of steam? Turbonomic recommends, "Hey, if you're going to continue to build like this, you need to start provisioning the host." We don't use it for that, but if I get those recommendations, I need to check on the garbage collection, i.e., deleting unused resources that someone built and forgot about.

My biggest advice about Turbonomic is to use it to its fullest potential. To get the best benefit, you need to use it and measure the results. And if you don't use it, they're going to come up and go, "Well, what are you using this for?" "Oh, I don't know," and they won't renew it.

If you already have distributed resource scheduling or similar tools, Turbonomic does a better job and can do other functions that DRS can't. VMware won't recommend ways to size a VM in Azure so you can move it. Why would they want to do that? Turbonomic is middleware, so it doesn't have skin in the game regarding placement. It's making impartial recommendations irrespective of whose storage, hypervisor, or cloud platform you're using.

We are using it mainly to manage the resource utilization for our virtual environment. We are using it for project planning, like the Windows 2008 upgrade with the infrastructure that needs to be built out for that. We are using it to manage our cloud expenses and the utilization within the cloud, which then drives cost reductions there. In the last few months, we started to do the application tagging so we can start to get down to specific application dashboards. This year, we want to start to drive more of the automation to reclaim unused resources, so I can then go ahead and delay further purchases. Our plan is to continue driving up the density of the environment.

Right now, we have certain tasks that get automatically done today. We are working on the piece which does the scheduling, using the change tickets, because we wanted to ensure there was an audit trail so we had an interface with our ticketing system worked out. So, we are getting ready to do that. Adding resources throughout the business day is no big deal, but we want to make sure we don't remove any resources (during the business day). We want to do this during a maintenance window to ensure that there will be no business impact. It is just being ultraconservative and sensitive to the business's needs. As they get more comfortable, we will continue ratcheting up the level of automation that we use. 

Everything is very specific with Turbonomic. We can take manual action throughout the day, if we see that it is necessary. We can have Turbonomic take certain specific actions automatically, then we can decide which ones we want to actually schedule so we can link them to approve change tickets.

It will show application metrics and estimate the impact of taking a suggested action from infrastructure resource utilization. I don't know if it will get down into the transaction level performance. I think the new release does that, but we haven't tested that piece out. However, this is the planning piece, e.g., if I were to remove the CPU, what would the performance and utilization look like? Or, in the case of some stuff that I was recently looking at, if I were to add the CPU, what does that do to the overall utilization metrics? You can then decide: Do I want to take that action?

The biggest lesson learnt is probably that people are afraid of change. Our biggest hurdle was putting their faith in automation versus we have always done it this way. We have always been oversized so the application teams would make sure that we never run out of resources, but they needed to be open to change. My favorite analogy that I like to use with them is, "I understand it is hard because instead of you telling me, 'I want this many CPU or this much memory.' I'm telling you trust me." It's like the gas gauge in your car. Don't look at the gas gauge when you get in your car. Just trust me that I have put enough gas in the car for you to get where you are going. It's a very difficult mindset for application teams who are used to saying, "Okay, I have eight CPUs over here. Don't touch them." But, Turbonomic actually gives us the data to show them, "You have eight CPUs over here. You'll never get above 40 percent utilization, so you are costing us money." So, it is fact-based decision-making.

My advice is, "Go for it." Don't let other teams hold you back because this is how they have always done it. Trust the Turbonomic team because they are great at being able to implement, and they are ready to move fast. Make sure you get all the right stakeholders, because we have had to deal with everything from:

• Engineering
• How do we do an internal chargeback?
• The application team's perception that I can't run with anything less than this. 

Get ready to be able to put some facts on the table and lean on the Turbonomic team because they are just phenomenal at helping put together business cases and doing the implementation. However, also get ready to tell your people to go for it. Don't be saddled with, "This is how we've always done it," because technology changes. I have seen nothing in my infrastructure career that was as great as this product when it comes to resource utilization.

I would give them a 10 (out of 10). The tool does what it says, and the Turbonomic people don't sell it to you, then disappear. They are always there and a pleasure to work with.

I rate IBM Turbonomic six out of ten. I would recommend it for capacity planning. Decision makers want to predict workloads and plan. We get excellent reports and recommendations for machine optimization and sizing. I wouldn't recommend it for monitoring. 

It doesn't pick up the entire supply chain automatically. It requires minimal effort in configuration. We have to show a relationship in a sense that this workload is associated with another workload. However, once that relationship is established, the solution helps us manage our business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources.

Our capital expenses are relatively flat. We are not purchasing any new equipment. We are actually in a consolidation process. Everything is getting moved to the public cloud. From an operational perspective, with our workloads being in the public cloud, it has provided us:

1. The ability to identify what we have running in the public cloud and how much it will actually cost us. 
2. How we can reduce public cloud operational costs, e.g., what actions can we do to help reduce operational expenses in the public cloud? 

It identifies areas where we can delete storage that is not being used. We can address right-sizing workloads that are overprovisioned in the public cloud as well as logging in long-term commitments with workloads in the public cloud and saving on incidents, on average for us, over 33% or higher for our workloads, as opposed to just paying the pay as you go hourly rate with the provider.

Try to look at things, not just from a cost savings perspective, but also from performance avoidance. We looked at: How do we quantify our spend in the public cloud and how do we avoid our spend in the public cloud? But we always forgot that there were workloads out there that do have performance impacts. So, we counted this as a cost savings and cost optimization tool, but it became so much more than that. 

We developed a crawl, walk, run approach. We took some workloads in our public cloud and looked at the business decisions. We took the decisions, then we tested to see what the outcomes were with them. As we went through those actions manually, gained the confidence on how those actions were being made, and what the post impact of that was, that allowed the business to become more confident in the tool. We no longer needed to have meetings to discuss why we were doing what we were doing.

It then became a point of communication. An action would be taken because Turbonomic said it was the right thing to do. Nowadays, it's not even questioned. When I talked to people about trying out Turbonomic and looking at how to adopt it in their workload, I say to look at areas which are current pain points in your environment and see where Turbonomic would fit into that instead of trying to come up with the workloads or use cases to plug into Turbonomic. Instead of trying to figure out what you have or seeing where you could put Turbonomic in your environment, see where your environment fits into Turbonomic. That was the way that we were able to drive adoption much faster and use it, not just as a reporting tool, but also as an orchestration tool as well.

They have some room to grow. I wouldn't give them a perfect 10. I would probably give them an eight and a half or nine (as a whole number).

I have not seen the new product after IBM acquired it, but based on my experience, I would advise building trust slowly. Whatever recommendations it is giving, first validate them. After the trust is established, you can do more things in terms of implementing recommendations.

My experience with Turbonomic has been good. I would rate it an eight out of ten.

I've been using Turbonomic as it moved from different versions for about three years. Right now, we're on the CWOM version of Turbonomic and its version 3.7. We're using it on-prem and we also are using Turbonomic for just cloud reporting.

Turbonomic would be one of the best in terms of application awareness. Just being able to see different applications and see their usage is great. 

I'd advise potential new users to do a proof of concept and try it. It's an excellent product and the level of savings, as well as the reports, will really give them hands-on experience in the environment to get arms wrapped around everything. It's an excellent product that has paid for itself.

For someone looking into Turbonomic that already has a process to optimize their environment and monitoring, it's a good idea to work with somebody in technical support to see if there's something that you could get Turbonomic to help you with. You should evaluate it for savings, test it out and do a proof of concept as well. Turbonomic is hands down one of the best products.

I'd rate it ten out of ten. It does a really excellent job of reporting, handling placement, measuring resources, and increasing or decreasing those resources. Overall the product just sells itself. It has been very helpful in the cloud and on-premise. 

Unfortunately, a lot of our infrastructure in the cloud is still legacy. So, we can't make full use of it to go out and resize a server, because it will bring the application down. However, what we are doing is setting up integration servers now. This puts a change control out to make the recommended change and the owner of the server can approve that change, then it will take place within a maintenance window.

We don't manage resources in real-time. Most of our applications just don't support that. We don't have enough changes required that it would be mutually beneficial to us, so we aren't doing that yet, but we're headed in that direction.

It would be a big stretch for us to actually use Turbonomic to take resources away from servers. Our company has a philosophy, which was decided four or five years ago that the most important thing for us is for our applications to be up. So, if we waste a little money on the infrastructure to bolster applications when there is a problem, that is okay. We even have our own acronym, it's called margin of error (MOE). Typically, we are looking to have at least 30 percent free capacity on any server or cluster at any given time, which is certainly not running in the most efficient way possible, but we're okay with that. While we may spend three million dollars more a year on infrastructure, an hour long outage might cost us a million dollars. So, if there is a major problem with it with big performance degradation, then we want to have the capacity to step up and keep that application afloat while they figure out the issue.

It projects the outcome of if you are going to move from one set of infrastructure to another, then it will make a recommendation. For example, if I'm moving from one type of server to another type of server where there are different core counts, faster cores, and faster memory, then it will tell me in advance, "You need fewer resources to make that happen because you are moving to better equipment."

Biggest lesson learnt: What you should do is the obvious, it is just difficult to get people to do it. You need to have servers grouped and reported up to an executive level that can show the waste. Otherwise, you are working with server owners who have multiple priorities. They have a release that's due in two weeks which will impact their bonus at the end of the year, etc. If you hit them up, and go, "Hey, you're wasting about a thousand dollars a week on this server, and more on the others, so we need to resize them." They don't care. On an individual application or server basis, it's not a big deal. However, across a 26,000 server environment, $10,000 here or there pretty becomes real money. That is the biggest challenge: competing priorities. You have one group trying to manage infrastructure for the least possible amount while getting the best performance, and you have other people who have to deliver functionality to a business unit. If they don't, the business unit will lose a million dollars a day until they get it. Those are tough priorities to compete with.

Build that reporting infrastructure right from the beginning. Make sure you have your applications divided up by business unit, so you can take that overall feedback and write it up when you are showing it to a senior executive, "Hey look, you are paying for infrastructure. You are spending a million dollars more a month than you should be."

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10). It is a great app. The only reason I wouldn't give them a higher rating is from a reporting standpoint. That's just not their focus, but better reporting would help. We use an app called Cloud Temple with them, who is actually a partner of theirs. Turbonomic will tell you reporting is not what they see as their core competency, and they are going to take actions to optimize your environment. However, at the same time, they have done these partnerships with another company who does better reporting.

I rate Turbonomic 10 out of 10. For anyone thinking about implementing Turbonomic, I would suggest having someone familiar with Kubernetes — the more familiar, the better. You need someone who knows how to run a Kubernetes command to see what's happening with the state of the Turbonomic deployment if necessary. If you've got someone who knows how to use Kubernetes, include them in the deployment process.

When you do your initial assessment, you have to understand your business needs and then choose the product.

We are not actively managing workloads in the cloud but it is something that we plan to do in the future. We are using Kubernetes on-premises, although we're trying to get more engagement from that team on the product. Importantly, the right-sizing on-premises is setting up our next steps in moving toward the public cloud, and toward that consumption model to the best that we can.

We may utilize Turbonomic in the cloud. The licensing switch that we went through really opened up not only the ability for us to easily scale to other private cloud environments that we have outside of our main one but much more easily scale to the cloud when we're there. I definitely would consider this tool to be a requirement as we start deploying infrastructure out in the cloud, just to help us understand that we're sizing to the best that we can.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is to utilize it to its fullest potential. This will include aligning your company's culture. The foundation of the product is putting resources where they're needed, and this is done based on actual data. The politics have to be thrown out the window. As long as that can work in your organization, then this is a great tool that can configure your environment to run optimally.

For someone that is interested in Turbonomic, but already has a process in place for monitoring and optimizing their environment, then this is something that should be evaluated. I can't say that it will replace the existing product but there is more at stake. For us, it's the support and the team that come with the product. This is what surprised me the most and something to look out for.

Overall, Turbonomic has had a positive effect on our application performance. It's helped on many different levels, including toward the resolution of problems. It's even helped flat out prevent problems from happening in the first place.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

If you have a big shop, and it's scattered all over the place, then definitely take a look at this tool. Make sure you take a look at this tool because there is probably fit for purpose licensing for any size organization. It's a great automation process.

Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action based on its input from AppDynamics. So, we plug it into AppDynamics, then AppDynamics and Turbonomic seem to work together for that. 

It knows what business-critical applications we have, but I don't think it manages anything specifically within the application itself. It is mostly just resource-driven.

As money starts to get tight and budgets start to get really scrutinized, I think people are going to have to start looking at using Turbonomic to help optimize cloud operations to reduce cloud costs.

We are going to continue to use it going forward. I just don't know at what level. There are a lot of changes being made to the infrastructure, so it's going to depend on the tools and things that become available, like VCF as well as all the products that they have built-in through vROps, enhanced vROps, and things that already come with the software.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10). Personally, there is a lot that it does that a regular person like me does not have the time to sit down and dig into it. We expect things to be a little bit more automated. That is why I gave it an eight. I would give it a 10 (out of 10) if I got in there and it's like, look, click, click, and click. However, I don't know if there is that kind of a comfort level here yet to just let this thing go and have its day with the place.

I would rate IBM Turbonomic ten out of ten.

We need to perform regular maintenance due to the frequent release of updates.

I recommend that users review their internal processes and partner with other departments to facilitate company-wide implementation. Collaboration will be crucial, so ensure they have a FinOps practice in place, or establish one if necessary.

I believe that we use version 8.3, and we may be a couple of versions behind the latest.

Turbonomic has tools for optimizing and monitoring cloud-based environments, although, at this point, we use it mainly for our on-premises environment. We used it to help estimate what our cloud costs would be. Consequently, we realized that we were much better, at the time, not migrating to the cloud from a monetary standpoint.

Using the cost estimate to run our workloads in the cloud, we found 25% to 30% savings by staying on-premises versus going to the cloud. This is because our workloads are not optimized for the cloud. We'd have to retool a lot, which becomes very expensive.

The problem with moving is based on our application stack, rather than something that can be changed in Turbonomic. They saved us money in this regard because their estimates are very well thought out and very informative.

My advice for anybody who is looking into Turbonomic is that it's a great product. There are other options on the market but from what I've seen, this is one of the better ones. I'd suggest starting slowly when it comes to the recommendations. Make sure that you're verifying what their recommendations are and building that trust up before going into a more automated mode. Once it is automated, it can move pretty quickly and if you're not ready for it, it can cause some issues.

If somebody were looking into Turbonomic but already has a process automator and does monitoring, it would really come down to whether they are looking for better ease of use, or having an all-in-one platform if they currently use multiple tools. It's going to do a lot of the same tasks and they would have to do their own research to see what is better for them. I like that it gives that single pane of glass visibility, whereas they might have multiple vendors and multiple applications in their current use case.

In summary, it's a good product. There are things that they're working on and they keep adding new features, so we're happy to see that.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Educate yourself on the product, as well as on the process. The process is even more important than the product because people need to understand that you're going to be making some changes to the environment. If they're resistant to that, then you're going to have challenges getting Turbonomic to be useful.

You not only need executive buy-in and senior leadership buy-in, you also need your engineers' buy-in. If your executives don't buy into it, your engineers certainly aren't going to. And even if your executives have bought into it, you still have to get the engineers on board because there are all kinds of ways not to do work.

And you have to understand your own company's processes around how to make changes to an environment. What is your change control process? Can you make changes in dev, test, and QA without a change ticket? How do you do production? Do you, in fact, do production?

I would recommend doing something like a workshop where you look at all the applications you're going to point Turbonomic at. Get each team together and explain to them how it's going to work and how it benefits them, as opposed to: "We bought a new product. You're going to use it. Deal with it." People like to know how it impacts their lives and why they're potentially doing more work. In the long run, it actually becomes less work. It's just hard to get past that point. In the movie "Cast Away" it was really hard for Tom Hanks to get past those waves. But once he got past them, he was fine. It's something like that, but not as dramatic; it's not that you're trying to save your life. But you have to explain to people why there's going to be some upfront work: to save them a lot of work on the back end.

In terms of the solution's visibility and analytics helping to bridge the data gap between disparate IT teams, we're working on that. Implementing Turbonomic is a journey. It's not "install it, and then it does what it does." You have to learn it and integrate it into your environment and your workflows. It does shed light on infrastructure and application teams having to work together, and that's a good thing. Application teams generally don't like infrastructure teams because they don't give them enough infrastructure. Infrastructure teams think the application teams complain too much. Turbonomic says, "Here is what you guys are doing. And here is how to get it done right. Work together," and everybody will be happy. That's more of a "people challenge" and less of a technology challenge.

But the visibility and analytics have not yet reduced our mean time to resolution. The solution hasn't had any impact on our application response time and it's not supposed to. Turbonics is supposed to change your resources based on your schedule, and you shouldn't notice it doing anything, except for the downtime that an application sometimes requires. It should be seamless.

Similarly, when it comes to helping our engineers focus on innovation and modernization, it's a work in progress. That's hard to quantify. It's our role, as architects, to help people do their jobs better and have more time to do innovation versus fixing. We are definitely spending less time worrying about application performance, because Turbonomic takes care of that. But in terms of innovation, I have no way to quantify that. We have people learning it and using it, but are we innovating better? I hope so.

We did some digging into Kubernetes and the solution does show you some good insights there, and it may have come a little farther in that regard since the last time I was hands-on with it. It gave us good insight into what our Kubernetes clusters were doing. Since then, we have moved on to doing more IaaS-based stuff.

Overall, it's the best product for APM that I've seen.

It's a worthwhile investment, at least to get it, get some sort of trial installed to see because it'll give you recommendations as to what it can do and it'll allow you to determine if it will help your environment or not.

There were many things that could be optimized in our environment that we did not know about before.

I would rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten.

I don't think Turbonomic provides you with a single platform that manages the full application stack. It manages a lot of the infrastructure stuff, Layer 1 through Layer 3 of the OSI model. It's mostly focused on infrastructure and making sure your infrastructure isn't over-provisioned. I wouldn't say it could all the way through the application.

Optimizing application performance on a continuous process is beyond the scope of a human to be able to do on a consistent basis. In other words, if you have 20 virtual machines, it's reasonable that a human could watch the utilization and determine size changes as needed, but if you're getting into hundreds of virtual machines, it becomes a task that's beyond the ability of a person to do by himself. It's a question of scale. As you get into hundreds of VMs, it becomes too tedious to keep track of and it becomes very time-consuming as well. Having said that, we don't use Turbonomic for that. We don't use it to manage any applications. We only use it to manage virtual machines.

We have only just started using containers. We haven't gotten into letting Turbonomic manage those containers. That's the only other thing that we would probably use it for at this point: managing the containerization. We use it right now for just cloud. We're pretty solid on on-prem because we've been doing a lot of migration of our on-prem stuff to the cloud. So we actually have a lot of compute resources available on-prem and we're not really worried about running into any resource issues.

Before Turbonomic, there was no person or group of people managing those aspects of our environment that it manages for us, but if there had been then, obviously, it would have reflected time savings at this point.

You need to know OpenShift well to utilize the product. That is probably my biggest piece of advice. The more you know OpenShift, the better off you are when it comes to the product. The product can be self-driving in many ways.

We came in with a very specific set of goals, and Turbonomic has been able to meet those goals. We have had no real roadblocks so far

Our only context for productionizing is Turbonomic for containerized environments in OpenShift. We have taken a look at using Turbonomic for VM management, but that is not part of our initial work.

We are not running any cloud activities right now.

I would rate them as a nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement. For example, if they lower the cost, I could get a 3:1 ROI.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

At one point the most valuable feature for us was Reserved Instances. The only problem with that today is that last year we changed from the EA licensing model to an MCA. At this moment, unfortunately, the Reserved Instances is not working. They're still working on it. It's in the roadmap, but that definitely was a big selling point for us. It worked well for us because we purchase a lot of Reserved Instances for our VMs.

Turbonomic makes a lot of recommendations to help prevent resource starvation. We can't implement all of them because it depends on our workloads. Not all the recommendations work for us because workloads on some of our VMs are very seasonal. There may be three times throughout the year, for about two weeks, where those VMs' usage is very high. They have to work at a high level. The solution can only go back a maximum of three months, and it won't work for us in some of those workloads because it doesn't have full visibility into the past year. But for some of our other workloads, those recommendations work.

Optimization of application performance is an ongoing process for us, especially as we move VMs from on-prem to Azure, or even build new VMs in Azure. More apps are being created and more services are being created, and we're taking advantage of that within Azure. However, we don't use Turbonomic's automation mode to continuously assure application performance by having the software manage resources in real-time. Our DevOps team is using Azure to control that automation.

For us, Turbonomic is an infrastructure service, VMs. As for applications, not yet, because now that we're introducing Kubernetes into our Azure environment, while it does have support for that, I don't know what it looks like yet. I have a meeting scheduled with them in order to configure that. It doesn't create it for you automatically in the back end. But it's more for our IaaS, infrastructure as a service. For storage, the closest thing now is the disk tiering with recommendations for going from and to different types of standard and premium SSD and HDD disks. Before, there wasn't that level of support. It was just VMs and family types, in our case.

We use manual execution for implementing the solution’s actions. We use manual because it depends on the business. We run a 24/7 shop. That's how it has always been on-prem, and that's how it is now in Azure, for our production VMs. We need to schedule maintenance windows because some of the recommendations from Turbonomic require a reboot. We need to schedule downtime with the application owners within the business.

Just do it, it takes very little time and effort to install, and once it is the data comes in relatively fast. That data will show you immediate issues that you can address. Then set up automation to move your machines to the most appropriate hosts. After that, start digging into the planning power that this thing has, and is getting better at. I think people will be shocked at how easy this is to get going and how much information you can get from it. Spend some time really learing the workload screen as well, it is worth the time.

I would definitely recommend a trial. It is a very good product, and it is worth its weight. It is something that is invaluable to most customers.

I would rate Turbonomic a nine out of ten.

My advice would be to come up with an agreement, in writing, that support on the product will have quarterly touch-point meetings to discuss what's new, what has changed, and what upgrades there are. Those quarterly touchpoints would be an ask, for me, if I had to buy the product again. For the initial deployment, I would recommend some sort of professional services engagement from IBM, just to make sure that you're utilizing it to its best potential.

If you're looking into Turbonomic but already have a process for optimizing your environment and for monitoring, I would suggest doing a comparison between what you have today and what Turbonomic can do. Do a like-for-like on the functions you use today and ask if Turbonomic does the same and whether it does it better. Also, you need to look into the licensing model. Be ready with those questions. You want to make sure Turbonomic will be a suitable replacement and not fall short because your current tool does more.

In terms of understanding when a performance risk exists, the solution does help to a certain point. It says "increase," or "decrease." But it doesn't give explicit information as to why. It doesn't say, "This system has been running hot for X number of days or weeks." Those kinds of details aren't there. It just provides a recommendation.

I would rate the potential of Turbonomic as a seven out of 10. I love the fact that there is slight automation, if you let it do that automation, and the whole forecasting piece is really good. It's a pretty good solution.

None.

Just load the demo. It's completely non-invasive and you will probably be blown away by how much over-provisioning you have been doing.

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?

No.

I rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten overall. I recommend evaluating it. Turbonomic might be easier than the product you currently use. You might be able to use the DRS mechanism in Turbonomic to get recommendations, and auto-sizing could make your life a lot easier.

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.

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

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

Any company with a virtual infrastructure should have Turbonomic.

This tool is excellent for a CFO, while other tools are geared more towards a CIO. This tool has a different market. We're currently working in Europe, carrying out implementations in both Italy and Portugal, and we're starting on a new deployment project in Dubai next week. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Something we need to do is make the solution aware of business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources. We need to make it aware of what's critical. We do that by setting up clusters and then setting certain policies on what is in each cluster. We separate critical things through clusters.

It's been a great fit for our organization.

Do a 30-day demo and actually use the product. You will quickly see how good or bad of a VMware admin you are.

If you use 3PAR, EMC, NetApp, and/or UCS, this will be invaluable to you, especially if you have junior staff.

It is a great way to give them visibility into those environments without granting them access.

I target it at the cloud to get a baseline against other tools, e.g., which ones we are going to go with long-term. Turbonomic, in our cloud, points towards development environments, not production environments.

We are not really application-specific. However, it does work well with the monitoring and ensuring performance. I can identify a performance issue just by opening the dashboard, even if I am not necessarily looking for one.

I would give it an eight (out of 10). It is a really good product.

I would recommend this product to others depending on what their need is and the size of their environment. I like what I've seen at this point, but it might not be the perfect fit for certain environments, but I would recommend it.

They constantly have quarterly webinars for their new releases, new functionality, and some of the new things they're doing. They do four major upgrades per year, but I probably use the tool to about 30% of its capacity. It probably has a lot more whistles and bells that I haven't even taken advantage of.

I would rate Turbonomic an eight out of ten.

As a manager of a large complex critical healthcare infrastructure, this product has been a huge benefit to me and my team. It is the go to solution for troubleshooting and decision-making regarding our VMware-based datacenters.

I would say if you have a VMware environment that you are having to spend almost any time load balancing and VMotioning your machines, you're going to need VMTurbo. If you have constrained resources, if you have a limited budget on how many hosts you can buy, you're going to need something like VMTurbo to make sure that the applications that need CPU and RAM are getting it, and the ones that don't are resized so that you can get those resources back.

In reviewing it, we really like to get hands on. We engaged a lot of times through the VMware user group. We get sponsors out to those meetings. We can talk to them face to face. We also talked to our co-members, and find out what they're using and see what kind of results they've had. We've only heard nothing but good things from VMTurbo.

If you need a product that can automate workload balancing, capacity planning, reporting of resource use - Turbonomic is a fantastic choice.

Give the demo version a go, you might be surprised by the results!

Right out of the box the hypervisor support is strong. VMWare shops probably get the most bang for your buck. UCS may be of use as well - additionally NetApp. Companies that have a single domain would find it easier to roll out the application management module due to only requiring the single set of credentials for deployment. Whereas in a multi-tenant environment, the provider requires visibility into each tenant’s domain which requires additional planning and may require a security design change.

None.

Take advantage of the deployment team to learn the best way to use it to your advantage in your environment.

We are very pleased with how Turbonomic is working out in our environment.

Great product, can't wait to set to auto drive and let it do its magic.

My experience with Turbonomic has been exceptional, they've offered me a $25 gift card to write a review of their company but I'd gladly write them a review for free. They really are a great company to work with and they have a great product.

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.

Turbonomic has provided us an automagic optimization of our environment from an operational point of view. I am not sure if we could have as easily setup the same functionality from vROps or on such a granular level.

No.

The support team is outstanding!

If you want to keep a detailed eye on your environment, and also pass off some of the administration to automation, Turbonomic is a great reliable platform for you.

I like to say "Set it and forget it". It has never made a bad decision. It obeys all rules you have in place in VMware. The reporting is fantastic and the forecasting has made the budgeting nightmare much easier in this area.

Like the rest of us, you will be hesitant to turn on "automagic" provisioning but you will be wondering why it took you so long to do so shortly after!

Having longer historical trending on resources has given us insight to our growth potential over the next few years.  This allows us to better budget our needs.

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

Automation is a good goal but we can't get there until the organization is ready.

None at this time.

Turbonomic helps me maintain a lean operations team. What used to take half my day now is automated. ROI on this is a no-brainer.

Wonderful account team and support. Training is exceptionally thorough. 

N/A

They are a great company to work with and have delivered a great product.

Try it out for free and see how quickly it can optimize your environment.

Better algo (looks at more metrics) than VMware's DRS.

Shopping around is important and depending on what gaps you're trying to fill one product may be better than the other.

Immediate ROI was seen due to the reduced IT infrastructure CapEx.

I highly recommend deploying Turbonomic prior to purchasing any hardware.

Great product!!

We continue to support this product and find value in what it does for us.

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!

We have really loved having VMTurbo. It keeps out workloads spread evenly across multiple hosts and has good analytics.

We purchased this product because it was the best that we evaluated. I'm very happy with our choice.

Understand the product and what it does, it falls into a little bit of a luxury tool, know how they approach the problem and you have to know your platform. This is not the kind of thing you buy off the shelf.

Not yet.

This is not a set it and forget product. You will have to look at what is going on and have a plan.

This has been a set-it-and-forget-it solution that does a great job but is behind the scenes.

Easier integration with Hyper-V hosts/clusters would be nice. Not sure if newer versions have been able to improve this.

VMTurbo is unique in its approach to resource usage tracking and recommendations based on it. There is no other tool I have found that can do what it does the way it does it. Highly recommended.

Load the demo and see the recommendations. You'll be blown away by how over-provisioned your virtual machines are.

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.

We are happy with Turbonomic. It has a very supportive technical team and a sales team. And let's not forget the training team for their dedication and contribution in educating us.

The ability to connect to many different environments along with the integration with partner systems make this an essential tool in our IS VM management strategy.

Turbonomics is doing great in enhancing their product.

We will continue to use the product because it works and is easy to monitor and train others in my team to use.

It works great. I definitely recommend it.

I would definitely recommend evaluating this product before making a purchase. It was well worth the purchase.

Nice product.

It is an excellent product backed by a fantastic team of technical and customer service staff.

Turbonomic is very unique and lends many strengths to further augment my virtual infrastructure.

Another aspect of being a VMTurbo customer is being a member of the Green Circle Community, an online community for innovators, virtualization experts and forward thinking IT professionals who engage with one another and share their experiences.

I’ve been involved since the beginning of the Green Circle,and it’s been such a great platform to engage with and help others.

The community is so diverse, and you know that what you read is true.

Whether you have a single, specific virtualization technology or a multi-platform environment, you need this software if you want to see end to end in your environment.

Go with it!

Great tool, easy to recommend.

My review is unbiased and true to my use, however I was promised compensation for my review.

As a MSP, a hidden gem is the planning guide. I use it for sales guys to determine if they need to purchase any new CPU nodes, for quotes they are preparing for potential clients.

I find their economics-based algorithms fascinating. It works brilliantly.

Great added value to our business.

Turbonomics is a GREAT Product - Worth every $$..

Great solution, great future.

As I said, Turbonomics has had immediate effect with both the day to day experience of our users by actively controlling resource congestion, and ensuring we could utilize the current resources to the full amount.

The product has worked great. It has become a set and forget tool for us which is a good thing.

Test the product give it a few days try it. You will see that it is well worth the investment.

With Turbonomic Operations Manager automated all environment virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V, vSphere, XenServer) with one unique management console. We save our CAPEX working with a plan inside of Operations Manager when we change hardware by lifecycle or when we have new projects, we have a capacity planning with that.

I have used tons of software that has had a huge learning curve. Turbonomic is easy to use, but has the ability to provide much more complex data and planning for projects and growth.

Great product and we use it extensively, from setting up VMturbo to load balance our VM's across a cluster, implementing right sizing recommendations, policy rules, memory/storage and CPU trends and plans for future projections in order to determine how we can reduce our hardware and licensing footprints.

Nope.

If you don't at least try it, you'll never know how much better things could be.

Do the 30 day demo, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

I love the product.

Looking forward to new features and planning to utilize rightsizing of our environment.

Definitely try this if you have a huge virtual infrastructure, it has become a staple in our environment.

I never regretted going with Turbonomic over vCops and would easily do it again.

We really love Turbo and the time it saves us.

Keep up the great work and keep the new features coming. We are excited to see what happens in the next 12 months with advancements.

Turbonomic was positioned perfectly to take advantage of a lack of metrics and tooling that was available for VMware at the time. Their tools were superior to even those provided by VMware. The market has since caught up, and there are many more competitors in this space. Turbonomic will need to continue to innovate and compound upon what makes them unique to stand out.

With this product, the admin IT takes time to do other kind of jobs and not to resolve problems.

It is a solid product that does what it says.

This is a great product, once it's set up, you hardly need to login to the interface.

The extra training we purchased was worth it. We learned a lot about how to use the product and get the most out of it.

I would like to see support for VMware NSX included.

Definitely try this if you have a huge virtual infrastructure, it has become a staple in our environment. Be very clear about what your needs are to ensure you receive proper licensing.

Easy virtual appliance based implementation. No advise needed.

This software has helped me ease my morning burden of adding/removing CPU and storage vMotions.