Better than the creators - Workload Balancing and Forecasting
October 22, 2015
Better than the creators - Workload Balancing and Forecasting
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Cloud Edition,Enterprise Edition
Overall Satisfaction with VMTurbo Operations Manager
VMTurbo Operations Manager is used across all of our production VMware clusters. We have disabled native VMware DRS migrations, favoring VMTurbo's methodology for balancing. The reason we selected VMTurbo Operations Manager was to maximize our host server investment to move towards a higher VMware density level. We are using it to balance workload on our host servers, recommend hardware changes, and forecast future scale and workload.
- The market based model for resource utilization drastically improves the workload balancing amongst our hosts. Trusting VMTurbo to just do things correctly took us some time, but in the end we have much more balanced resources usage.
- The recommendations provided by the tool for right-sizing VMs are excellent. I used VMware vCenter Operations previously and it did not provide clear action items, instead relying on your ability to determine the best course of action. Our environment does not allow us to act immediately upon these recommendations or automate them, but we log the information to make recommendations during the next maintenance window.
- The modelling and planning tools allow us to understand what hardware and licensing needs we will require as we scale our environment for predicted growth. The ability to use reference VMs for this scaling makes the forecast more accurate.
- Policy assignment is flexible but in some instances counter-intuitive. Knowing the best way to enact a change requires some thought.
- Storage DRS requires more in-depth product knowledge. It does not recognize storage clusters by default and without this knowledge you may be letting VMTurbo make very bad recommendations.
- We approached the purchase of the software hoping to show that we would not need to purchase additional servers to perform the work forecast for the next calendar year. We were able to more precisely balance our workload and did not need to add the additional hardware we originally forecasted.
- The direct right-sizing remediation suggestions saved valuable troubleshooting and time. We no longer have to invest the same amount of resources watching trouble counters and determining what action may best improve the function of a host.
Prior to using VMturbo we had VMware vCenter Operations standard deployed throughout our production environment. At that time, VMware had not made the overhaul and improvements to the application that are not in place. The value that VMturbo brought greatly exceed that which we were getting from the VMware product at that time. I must stress that at this point in time (November 2014) there was no comparison between the two products and VMTurbo won hands down. We have not re-evaluated the fit against the current VMware vRealize product.