Turbonomic jets us through virtualization management!
April 29, 2016

Turbonomic jets us through virtualization management!

Keith Braithwaite | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Cloud Edition,Enterprise Edition

Overall Satisfaction with Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo)

We use Turbonomic in our Corporate IT Server Virtualization Infrastructure to help us keep a good handle on the health and growth of our VM space. It helps us in three main areas:
* It automates regular maintenance activities previously performed by IT Staff, such as moving VMs to a host or storage with more resources, and increasing or decreasing compute resources based on an individual VMs' workload.
* Through this automation, we are able to gain more efficiency and have a more dense workload with the same performance.
* We are able to forecast growth much more easily.

Pros

  • The greatest benefit is that we are able to spend less time managing our VM infrastructure while maintaining an equal or better insight into what is going on.
  • We are able to plan budgets better due to its forecasting capabilities.
  • We are able to reduce many of our VMs vCPU and vRAM resources knowing that the VM will still perform at the same level, due to VMTurbo's analysis of each VMs utilization.

Cons

  • While the UI is ok, it sometimes takes a little time to find what you're looking for. If we had an admin it there regularly, this wouldn't be an issue for him. It's the users (like me) who login once a month or so who struggle getting around. The irony is that because of the automation and preventative care that VMturbo offers, I don't have to be in there more regularly.
  • Positive: I've been able delay hardware purchases despite continued growth due to resource savings. Our ROI will be seen in about 12 months, perhaps less when you consider the less tangible metric of allowing our admins spend their time on other areas of responsibility.
We are adjusting the the control Turbonomic gives us. We like the idea of scheduling resource reduction activities (which with our VMware licensing requires downtime), but have not yet done it. We do really like how Turbonomic gives us a list of suggested changes (that we could fully automate) that takes a lot of the work out of fine-tuning our environment.
I've only used Turbonomic in a VMware environment, and it works very well. I would imagine that environments where multiple virtualization platforms are used would be an even better scenario for Turbonomic because it isn't built for one single platform.

Comments

More Reviews of IBM Turbonomic