VMTurbo at our Firm
November 06, 2015
VMTurbo at our Firm
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Cloud Edition,Enterprise Edition
Overall Satisfaction with VMTurbo Operations Manager
We use VMTurbo Operations Manager to manage our vSphere cluster that hosts the server workload for our organization. It provides load balancing across the hosts in the cluster using different metrics than DRS (VMWare native functionality) and automatically vmotions machines as appropriate to keep the cluster load evenly distributed while respecting the pinned workloads that we have defined using affinity rules. We also use it for planning purposes which has allowed us to achieve greater density without the guess work of how much load is too much for existing resources.
- VMTurbo Operations Manager identifies resource constrained servers (those that need additional vCPUs or RAM).
- VMTurbo Operations Manager identifies over provisioned servers (typically those where the application owner or vendor has spec'd too much RAM).
- VMTurbo Operations Manager provides a tool to show the impact of various changes in workload or in host count to the overall environment.
- Because of their supply chain and relative weighting, a host can be shown as "critical" when in fact it is just out of balance a little. The application can be tuned to overcome this behavior to a certain extent.
- This is a tool for use by admins, not end users, and so the user interface is sometimes very text and information heavy. For some people that might be a problem.
- In the past the active directory authentication options were non-trivial to configure and required manually creating user accounts in VMTurbo to match those in the active directory you wanted to use. I haven't looked at it again in the current version but it would be nice if it could use groups instead of individual users and if those groups could be pulled from active directory without recreating them in VMTurbo.
- No support for Nimble storage as of yet.
- Greater density of VMs without concern for resource over utilization. We can use just six hosts for all our servers versus having to provision additional hosts out of concern that we were resource bound.
- Easier to make decisions on workload placement and to plan for adding additional applications to our environment. Less guesswork.
We looked at the native VMWare vCops (now called something else) and found that VMTurbo provided a more relevant set of information for our environment. The interface was easier to use, easier to recognize what was happening in the cluster. The pricing was also significantly less although that wasn't a primary driver for us. We started with a bias towards the native VMWare solution but in the end were convinced as a team that VMTurbo was a better choice at that time for our organization.