IBM Turbonomic vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager comparison

IBM Turbonomic vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

IBM Turbonomic

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

5th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

205

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Management (4th), IT Financial Management (1st), IT Operations Analytics (11th), Cloud Analytics (1st), Cloud Cost Management (1st), AIOps (15th)

SolarWinds Virtualization M...

Ranking in Virtualization Management Tools

7th

Average Rating

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Virtualization Management Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Turbonomic is 13.5%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is 11.5%, up from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Virtualization Management Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
IBM Turbonomic	13.5%
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager	11.5%
Other	75.0%

Virtualization Management Tools

Featured Reviews

reviewer1446966

Senior Systems Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution reduced our operational expenditures and is able to identify points before we even noticed them

The management interface seems to be designed for high-resolution screens. Somebody with a smaller-resolution screen might not like the web interface. I run a 4K monitor on it, so everything fits on the screen. With a lower resolution like 1080, you need to scroll a lot. Everything is in smaller windows. It doesn't seem to be designed for smaller screens. When I change the resolution to 1080, I only see half of what I would on my big 4K monitor. It would be annoying to have to scroll to see the flow chart. They have a flow chart that goes top to bottom like a tree. On a lower resolution, it might be nice if that scrolls horizontally because it's long, narrow, and tall. It's only three icons wide, but it's 15 icons tall. I think it would be helpful to have the ability to change that for a smaller screen and customize the widget.

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Ravi Khanchandani

Founder Director at Techsa Services

Optimizing virtual environments by reclaiming and allocating resources efficiently

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization. It provides me with recommendations for resource allocation, indicating if a virtual machine is under-provisioned or over-provisioned. This allows me to reclaim resources, such as reducing the number of CPU cores or RAM, which is beneficial. Its capacity planning feature is also very useful for me. The GUI is highly simplified, cutting across various virtualization platforms, including VMware, Hyper-V, and Nutanix environments.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"VMTurbo is unique in its approach to resource usage tracking and recommendations based on it."

"Today we have found the forecasting of the environment and optimization the most beneficial."

"We have been able to use the planning feature to consolidate VMs on few hosts and have been able to show savings of several hundred thousands."

"The notifications saying, "This is a corrective action," even though some of them can be automated, are always welcome to see. They summarize your entire infrastructure and how you can better utilize it. That is the biggest feature."

"Customer Service: Great. Always very helpful, above and beyond most companies."

"Customer Service: Excellent! Both pre-service and post-service were world class."

"Turbonomic essentially pays for itself in the first 30 days of use and can completely replace an operations team for maintaining a healthy environment."

"Automation, policies, and reports have made a lot of previously manual work now either more efficient or completely automated."

More IBM Turbonomic pros

"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is a great tool that is easy to use...It is a stable solution."

"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."

"Alerting expands, and makes, our monitoring and management much more efficient."

"This product is so helpful out-of-the-box."

"SolarWinds Virtualization Manager optimizes VM performance and virtualization."

"Virtualization manager’s cost analysis comparison report identified areas in which specific customers were being grossly undercharged for their resource consumption levels, as compared to rates available through AWS."

"The most valuable features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager are the non-Windows servers' monitoring and capacity planning."

"If you’re looking to get a lot more insight into your virtualization environment and more than just basic information, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is the choice you should make."

Cons

"While the product is fairly intuitive and easy to use once you learn it, it can be quite daunting until you have undergone a bit of training."

"The UI can be slow and occasionally hangs, requiring logging out and back in."

"We're still evaluating the solution, so I don't know enough about what I don't know. They've done a lot over the years. I used Turbonomics six or seven years ago before IBM bought them. They've matured a lot since then."

"Reports take time to custom tweak."

"Interface and navigation can be a challenge if you do not spend a lot of time with it."

"In Azure, it's not what you're using. You purchase the whole 8 TB disk and you pay for it. It doesn't matter how much you're using. So something that I've asked for from Turbonomic is recommendations based on disk utilization. In the example of the 8 TB disk where only 200 GBs are being used, based on the history, there should be a recommendation like, "You can safely use a 500 GB disk." That would create a lot of savings."

"We did see a few issues on a previous version with reporting."

"Since the introduction of a HTML 5 based interface, our main - but minor - criticism of a less than intuitive operation managers' GUI would be the area of improvement."

More IBM Turbonomic cons

"I had some stability issues. I lost my environment."

"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."

"The problem or issue with the product is related to its pricing."

"Out of the box support for a wider array of hardware vendor/device-specific SNMP mibs could be improved upon."

"The SolarWinds Virtualization Manager platform in general can have a better response time in the performance."

"SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems."

"Adhoc reporting takes time to get used to – due mainly to the fact that the team I am on are all admins, and not necessarily accustomed to query reporting in the manner utilized by Solarwinds Virtualization Manager."

"The UI is a little cumbersome at first, but the more you use it and get accustomed to it, the simpler it becomes."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know the current prices, but I like how the licensing is based on the number of instances instead of sockets, clusters, or cores. We have some VMs that are so heavy I can only fit four on one server. It's not cost-effective if we have to pay more for those. When I move around a VM SQL box with 30 cores and a half-terabyte of RAM, I'm not paying for an entire socket and cores where people assume you have at least 10 or 20 VMs on that socket for that pricing."

"It is an endpoint type license, which is fine. It is not overly expensive."

"Licensing is per socket, so load up on the cores rather than a lot of lower core CPUs."

"I know there have been some issues with the billing, when the numbers were first proposed, as to how much we would save. There was a huge miscommunication on our part. Turbonomic was led to believe that we could optimize our AWS footprint, because we didn't know we couldn't. So, we were promised savings of $750,000. Then, when we came to implement Turbonomic, the developers in AWS said, "Absolutely not. You're not putting that in our environment. We can't scale down anything because they coded it." Our AWS environment is a legacy environment. It has all these old applications, where all the developers who have made it are no longer with the company. Those applications generate a ton of money for us. So, if one breaks, we are really in trouble and they didn't want to have to deal with an environment that was changing and couldn't be supported. That number went from $750,000 to about $450,000. However, that wasn't Turbonomic's fault."

"Price is a big one. VMTurbo was very competitively priced."

"Contact the Turbonomic sales team, explain your needs and what you're looking to monitor. They will get a pre-sales SE on the phone and together work up a very accurate quote."

"You should understand the cost of your physical servers and how much time and money you are spending year over year on expanding your virtual farm."

"IBM Turbonomic is an investment that we believe will deliver positive returns."

More IBM Turbonomic pricing and cost advice

"The is an annual subscription needed to use this solution."

"The maintenance and support are a part of the package, meaning it is included in the product's price."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Non Profit

10%

Government

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	41
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	147

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	3

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Turbonomic?

It offers different scenarios. It provides more capabilities than many other tools available. Typically, its price is set as a percentage of the consumption of some of our customers' services. The ...

What needs improvement with Turbonomic?

The implementation could be enhanced.

What is your primary use case for Turbonomic?

We use IBM Turbonomic to automate our cloud operations, including monitoring, consolidating dashboards, and reporting. This helps us get a consolidated view of all customer spending into a single d...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

This solution delivers significant cost savings, especially from a capacity perspective. Consistent monitoring is essential in a virtualization environment, and Virtualization Manager, or VMAN as i...

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

SolarWinds needs to support integration with other virtualization platforms like KVM or Linux-based systems.

What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Virtualization Manager?

We predominantly work with financial organizations such as large banks, stock exchanges, and insurance companies, as well as IT-enabled services (ITES). I use SolarWinds Virtualization Manager at o...

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Product Reports

IBM Turbonomic

Download IBM Turbonomic product report

Virtualization Management Tools

Download SolarWinds Virtualization Manager product report

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager report

Also Known As

Turbonomic, VMTurbo Operations Manager

SolarWinds VMAN

Interactive Demo

IBM

Demo not available

SolarWinds

Overview

IBM Turbonomic enhances IT efficiency with automation, capacity planning, and reporting features, enabling organizations to optimize resource utilization and improve performance through advanced workload management and scenario analysis.

IBM Turbonomic equips organizations with robust capabilities for dynamic resource allocation and informed decision-making. Its planning module provides scenario analysis, right-sizing recommendations, and a customizable dashboard for tailored insights. Automation features improve workload placements and resource efficiency, while forecasting capabilities enhance performance. Simulation of environments helps in decision-making, leading to significant savings in cloud and hardware management. There is a need for a more intuitive interface, enhanced navigation, and improved customization in reporting with integration potential with third-party applications. Transition to the HTML5 interface and stronger training resources are among anticipated improvements.

What are the key features of IBM Turbonomic?

Automation: Automates workload placement and dynamic resource allocation to boost efficiency.
Capacity Planning: Provides scenario analysis and right-sizing for optimal resource use.
Customizable Dashboard: Offers tailored insights for organization needs.
Forecasting: Enhances decision-making through resource-use predictions.
Simulation Capabilities: Aids in assessing savings and performance gains.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Cost Optimization: Reduces spending on cloud and hardware resources.
Enhanced Performance: Promotes consistent application performance and resource efficiency.
Improved Decision-Making: Supports informed choices with scenario simulation.
Flexibility and Scalability: Assists with workload migrations and resource management across environments.

IBMTurbonomic is implemented across industries such as cloud management and virtualization, helping organizations balance clusters, optimize virtual machine performance, and manage Azure configurations. In resource-monitored environments like VMware and XenServer, its features facilitate load balancing, VM rightsizing, and automation shutoffs. Industries can rely on its insights for cost-saving measures, ensuring efficient resource allocation for hybrid and cloud environments.

IBM

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager reduces downtime by 53% and time spent troubleshooting by 59%. Analyze and remediate VM performance problems by viewing active, critical, and warning issues in your environment.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

IBM, J.B. Hunt, BBC, The Capita Group, SulAmérica, Rabobank, PROS, ThinkON, O.C. Tanner Co.

Elliot Health System

IBM Turbonomic vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager