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Managing a 21 Node VMware VSphere Cluster with Turbonomic
November 24, 2015

Managing a 21 Node VMware VSphere Cluster with Turbonomic

Michael Knych | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Cloud Edition,Enterprise Edition

Overall Satisfaction with Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)

International Paper uses Turbonomic to help our data center operations staff groups who manage our VMware environments to get a complete understanding of how the CPU, memory, network and storage resources are being used. Turbonomic provides a complete understanding of our environments to allow us to optimize the VMware clusters that allow us to drive up capacity usage while maintaining required performance levels.

Since most of our VMware environments house Windows VMs, VMware is supported and managed by our Windows admin groups. They use Turbonomic to optimize VM placements and to plan for migrations to new VMware hardware infrastructure. Our capacity planning group uses Turbonomic to track and report resource usage and plan future capacity requirements using the plan capacity modeling features of Turbonomic.

  • Turbonomic consolidates a large amount of performance and resource usage data from Virtual Center into a concise and easy to understand format that makes it extremely easy to understand how resources are being used within VMware. We've found no other tool that can do this.
  • Turbonomic's supply chain algorithms for managing resource usage within VMware has proven itself over the years we've used it. The recommendations it makes not only optimize the resources across the cluster nodes but actually places VMs to improve their performance.
  • As a capacity planner, I use the plan modeling component of Turbonomic on a continuing basis to plan and track our VMware cluster capacity consumptions. In our experience, the modeling tool has paid for our Turbonomic licenses many times over in the last few years.
  • Turbonomic has the best tech support group I've ever worked with (and I've been around IT for 35+ years).
  • The reporting features still need some work. Turbonomic has improved this area over the last few years but it still needs some work. It needs a way to allow the user to create their own reports without having to have a detailed understanding of SQL. It needs a report writer that one can pick and choose elements to report on. The report feature started out this way and then diverged away from a report writer interface.
  • The documentation can always use improvements. It needs more details and examples about setup and usage. However, the Green Circle User Community boards provide a large amount of wonderful information. Also, tech support is the best I've ever seen from any vendor.
  • Should move away from Flash technology to HTML5 for UI. The UI is great even with Flash. It could even be better with HTML5.
  • Turbonomic has improved the efficiency of our VMware admin support staff. I call VMTurbo Operations Manager our automated VMware admin person. It's saved countless hours over the last four years that would have been spent trying to compile and report VC performance and resource usage data.
  • It's saved tens of thousands dollars in cost avoidance by allowing us to squeeze the most of current capacity and to more accurately plan for replacement and future capacity. We don't have to guess anymore.
  • Turbonomic has helped International Paper institutionalize virtualization r by providing us with accurate and concise information to help us more effectively manage our VMware environments.

International Paper reviewed vKernel and VMware Operations Manager (now vRealize).

We found that vKernel didn't provide the in depth analytics provided by Turbonomic across all the nodes of the cluster. It did not consolidate the information into easy to understand metrics.

VMware Operations Manager had the same issues as vKernel and was very expensive to acquire and complicated to implement and maintain.

Turbonomic is better suited for a large virtualized environment with a large number of host servers (3+) and a large number of VMs (50+) that are very diverse in their workloads and usage requirements. It's going to provide more value for these large dynamic environments.

For smaller and or more sable environments, once things get to a steady state, there is not much else Turbonomic can do to keep things optimized. It's going to provide some value but not as much compared to larger and more dynamic environments.

One of the VMware environments we monitor with Turbonomic is a 21 node VMware cluster with over 750 VMs (mostly Windows 2008 and 2012). The VMs run the spectrum of applications, resource requirements and landscape (Prod, Test, Dev). We could not manage this environment without Turbonomic helping us understand the madness of this highly dynamic environment.