Item: IBM Turbonomic
Rating: 6
Author: Chris Saenz

Overall Satisfaction with Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it to help manage the compute resources being used in our datacenter. We have increased our VM deployments exponentially over the past few years without ensure efficient use of our resources. Turbonomic was implemented to help identify underutilization of resources to recover tied up resources and ensure that our most important applications had the resources they needed. It was used in our campus-wide datacenter that houses all VMs for our university.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Presentation is nice. Its easy to understand what your looking at and the data that is being presented to you.
Properly identify resource utilization and recommendations for action on how VMs can be improved and resources can be better utilized.
It was also able to tell us the same information and analysis for cloud resources. I was not expecting that.

Cons

Cost; the licensing was simply too expensive for us to make any use of.

Return on Investment

It showed us where we can save on resource utilization and some VMs that could improve performance
It was hard to realize an ROI because of the high cost for licensing. In the end, we discontinued use.

Managing Virtual / Cloud Environments with IBM Turbonomic

Not really; VMTurbo touts that it does a better job than DRS and sDRS, but for us at least, without many tiers and different environments, DRS and sDRS were fine at managing VM placement and sizing.Our group that manages VMs and cloud environments is fairly small, so managing it within our team has not been extremely difficult without VMTurbo

Alternatives Considered

VMware ESXi

The only comparable alternative has been DRS and sDRS which are native to vCenter. These tools have had to suffice for managing resources and placement. Thusfar, they have been working for us well. Although there is some manual work and reliance on monitoring tools to ensure VMs get the resources they need.

Likelihood to Recommend

Large deployments (on-site and cloud) where resource utilization is hard to account for. VM Turbo can analyze what is happening in your datacenter and recommend or actually implement its suggestions for performance and resource management. It also claims to know about network and disk resources and how to put VMs in the proper resources to gain performance in network and disk. We didn't really try this, but is nice to know it has some ability to be aware of network and disk.
If you have your datacenter resources under strict control, VMTurbo may not help all that much. Likewise, if your datacenter is fairly flat with no tiers of storage, compute, or network performance, or if there is simply more demand than can be met, than there is not much that VMTurbo can do. It can't create IO and CPU cycles out of thin air.

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VMTurbo gives insight into you datacenter; but at a cost!

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