VMTurbo - Take off in getting your infrastructure under control!
Updated November 24, 2015
VMTurbo - Take off in getting your infrastructure under control!
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 being used on several private cloud infrastructures that we host for some of our customers. These infrastructures require a solution which can automatically balance the workloads to ensure they run at the optimised operating level, as well as reporting on the capacity being used and available. These requirements are vital to the support and planning teams to maintain the infrastructure and allow more resource workloads to be added without impacting existing workloads and giving procurement teams notice of advanced hardware procurement.
- Working alongside DRS rules within the VMware vCentre, VMTurbo manages and balances the computing workloads as it uses better calculating formulas and enhances the DRS rules in place.
- VMTurbo monitors not just the computing resources, but network and storage IO, allowing better placement of VMs on lower latency connected hosts and on better higher performing datastores.
- Automatically generated summary reports every week give a great overview of the system and reduces the need to constantly monitor the environment. VMTurbo helps the infrastructures manage themselves.
- It takes a bit of understanding of the way that VMTurbo does all of the calculations and based on this, getting the correct settings/thresholds in place to ensure the workload balances/costs is quite tricky to get correct.
- We have had a positive ROI on our VMTurbo deployments. We had been looking at purchasing new hardware to add more computing resources to one VMware infrastructure and this would have been >£75K. However the costs of purchasing and deployment of VMTurbo and only procuring extra memory was only £50K, thus saving over £25K on hardware alone. Extra costs would have been required for hosting these extra servers (i.e. power, cooling, rack space).
- Cibra and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager
VMTurbo has a smaller computing and storage footprint than the other tools tested. It was very easy to set up and within 2 hours it was already highlighting areas of interest. There was no requirement to get any professional services involved, and no other products are required to get VMTurbo working.
VMTurbo Operations Manager Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - We run 2 core infrastructures as well as an test/dev environment. The original evaluation went into the test/dev environment to test the ease of installation/configuration. We then deployed a POC in our larger estate. This POC returned results within 1 day and we then used this as a basis for a full licensed deployment. After a few months of getting used to the product and having on-site training, we then deployed into the smaller estate.
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - VMTurbo deploys as a Virtual Appliance, with little configuration. However we had have to get firewall rules in place to enable VMTurbo to communicate with the different VMware vCentres. This was a single case of port 443 and creating vCentre service accounts. We already used vMotion processes, so no changes were required to allow VMTurbo to do its automation.
- Setting correct costing for computing resources
- Setup of scheduled email reports
VMTurbo Operations Manager Training
- In-person training
VMTurbo Operations Manager Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - We had an issue with the setup of scheduled reports going to non-standard domain names. This was raised as a bug and investigated within a few days. It took a month to get a fix. VMTurbo ensure that their product is updated every quarter, so our fix got issued as part of a quarterly fix. We were kept updated of the on-going ticket every week.
I had a particular request for a customised report. I asked the user forum to assist and one of the VMTurbo support team/developers responded within a few hours with a solution.
Using VMTurbo Operations Manager
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Convenient Feel confident using | Requires technical support |
- Automated resource management
- Report generation
- Resource planning requires the configuration of the VM template details to be setup correctly
Upgrading VMTurbo Operations Manager
Yes - VMTurbo updates are very easy to deploy. We use the offline method as the system have no external internet access. A simple 400Mb zip file is uploaded to the Update page URL and within 10 mins, we are running on the latest version. We do this every quarter without fail and within issues.
- Bug fixes
- Product enhancements
- more product enhancements based on additional application monitoring.
Yes - We had the free version deployed within our test/dev environment to get a feel for the product. We then had a fully featured POC license for 30 days running in our production environments, while we did further testing and waiting for the procurement of our full license.