IBM Turbonomic Reviews

There have been quite a few use cases, even some that were probably unintended. 

1. Reduce our footprint and cost. It handled that perfectly. 
2. Handle our RI purchasing, which is what we are in the process of doing now. 
3. Automating shutdowns and startups so we can turn machines off when they are not being used. We have several machines in this category. We are going to continue to add more to it, once we go through some finalization. We are using it to delete unattached volumes to manage databases.

The unintended use case was that we started looking at what else could we save. We realized that we had a ton of data in Blob Storage for backups. Turbonomic can't see that, but it brought it to light because we wanted to find a way to look at our overall spending. So, we have saved a bunch of money by reducing that footprint. 

It's on-prem, but we are in the process of moving into the cloud.

It helped reshape the organization. We used to have around 46 admins who could create virtual machines in Azure, and it was very difficult to manage them. It became exceedingly expensive, getting to a point where it received attention from the president of the company. Installing Turbonomic gave us sort of a governor over our cloud environment, where people started to really understand that everything you do has a cost. Now, we have like four or five admins. If someone wants a VM, we run a plan based off: available RIs, cheapest costs, and can it go into shut down mode at night? This has helped us create a standard of implementation going forward to prevent us from spending the money in the first place. While I'm sure Turbonomic would say that's their overall goal, we just never really saw it that way. 

I didn't know it was going to change how we submit tickets and work orders for adding service to the environment. That has all changed for the better.

I know when we are moving workloads from on-prem to the cloud, we have not been utilizing the planning in Turbonomic as much as we should. I think that is changing. People who have access to Turbonomic are now realizing, "Here are the specs of my machine. Turbonomic will put it in the cheapest compute resource template that it can find." 

This is starting to change how we even consider building something. We don't ask the end user, "What do you need?" Instead, we say, "What do you want to host?" Then, we look at other virtual machines out there. If we want to host a website, then it will be X number of users per day, month, or year. We look at some of our other marketplaces, then we make a plan to see what Turbonomic recommends, as it takes into account the disk, IOPS, RI, CPU, RAM, etc. This helps us prevent the spend in the first place. The idea where we build then save on the backend, that is what's changing. We are no longer just building blindly, then going to Turbonomic, and saying, "Okay, fix what we built." We are saying, "Turbonomic, tell us what we should build." I would rather do it when we build a machine than have to take a website down and schedule maintenance at two in the morning on Saturday when I am at the bar.

It gives people like me, who are engineers, the ability to launch environments without having to create a bunch of changes down the road. I think that's a wake-up call for a lot of the people at the company. Because we would just build our build, where we were spending $5,000 more than we should, so then we have to put in change tickets and scale all that back. I don't have to do that anymore.

If we see a system or service increasing usage, we can then anticipate building it out bigger to manage traffic and workflow. With version 8, it will almost be like having a tool to manage our machines actively versus just actions.

The Executive Dashboards are probably the best way to showcase what we are spending, what we can save, and how to grease the wheel to make it happen. A lot of times when we say, "Hey, we're spending too much," executives just go, "Yeah, well, it's just the cost of doing business." However, when they see a report where it shows, "You can save $8,000 a month," and it can provide those results. That is really powerful for upper management because they are very non-technical. They just know this thing exists, we have to pay for it, and it's critical to have, but they don't understand the nuts and bolts of it. The Executive Dashboards are probably the most beneficial overall for the business. However, as a techie guy, I don't think that they are the best for me.

Personally, the most valuable feature is the organization of it all, e.g., being able to drill down into any category and feeding the maps. It helps a lot by giving a visual representation of what is dependent on what. With the maps, you can drill into the different sections of the topography and find out what is what.

I like the tool overall from top to bottom. Anything that can save money and preserve productivity is going to get an A-plus in my book. 

Turbonomic provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. For example, if we see a machine that is being overly utilized, then it needs to be increased in space, size, RAM, and processor.

It provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation by scanning the environment every 10 minutes. It looks at 30 days worth of metrics per node. So, if it sees an upward trend on a machine, then I will get an alert that says, "You may want to scale up to accommodate the needs of this machine." However, it's not super fast. For example, it's not as fast as if I set a virtual machine to scale up or out as needed on the fly, but it does give us an overview of being able to see trends that we can plan for.

There are some issues on that point of it providing us with a single platform that manages the full application stack. I think version 8 is going to solve a lot of those issues. Turbonomic version 6 doesn't delete anything. So, if I create a VM, then destroy the VM, Microsoft doesn't delete the disk. You have to go in and manually do that. Turbonomic will let you know that it's there and that it needs to be deleted, but it doesn't actually manually delete the disk. The inherent problem with that is, it will say, "This disc is costing you $200 a month." Then, I go in and delete it. Since this is being done outside of the Turbonomic environment, that savings isn't calculated in the overall savings because it's an action that was taken outside of Turbonomic. I believe with Turbonomic 8, that doesn't happen anymore. 

We are still saving the money, but we can't show it as easily. We have to take a screenshot of, "Hey, you're spending this much on a disk that isn't needed." We then take a screenshot after, and say, "Here is what you're spending your money on," and then do a subtraction to figure it out. So, there are some limitations. 

It is the same with the databases. If a database needs to be scaled up or scaled down, Turbonomic recommends an action. That has to be done manually outside of the Turbonomic environment. Those changes are also not calculated in the savings. So, it doesn't handle the stack 100 percent. However, with version 8 coming out, all of that will change.

I would love to see Turbonomic analyze backup data. We have had people in the past put servers into daily full backups with seven-year retention and where the disk size is two terabytes. So, every single day, there is a two terabyte snapshot put into a Blob somewhere. I would love to see Turbonomic say, "Here are all your backups along with the age of them," to help us manage the savings by not having us spend so much on the storage in Azure. That would be huge.

Resources, like IP addresses, are not being used on test IP addresses. With any of the devices that you would normally see attached to a server resource group, such as IP addresses, network cards, etc., you can say, "Look, public IP addresses cost $15 a month. So if you don't have a whole lot of money and a hundred IP addresses on a public IP sitting there not being used, you're talking $1500 a month YOY." That becomes quite a big chunk of money. I know that Turbonomic is looking at the lowest hanging fruit. That is not something worth developing for only $15 a month saving, but I would love to see Turbonomic sort of manage Azure fully versus just certain components.

One thing that has always been a bit troublesome is that we want to look at lifetime savings. So, we want to say, "Okay, we installed this appliance in October 2018. We want to know how much money we have saved from 2018 until now." The date is in there. It is just not easy to get to. You have to call an API, which dumps JSON data. Then, you have to convert that to comma separated values first. After that, you can open an Excel spreadsheet, which has hundreds of rows and columns. You can find the data that you want and get to it, but it is just not easy. However, I believe there is a fix in version 8 to solve this problem. 

When we switch to version 8, we can't upgrade our appliance, because it's a new instance. What that means is we will lose all our historical data. This is a bummer for us because this company likes to look at lifetime savings. This means I have to keep my old appliance online, even though we're not using it for that data and I can't import that data into the new appliance. That is something that is kind of a big setback for us. I don't know about other companies and how it is being handled, but I know I will need to keep that old appliance online for about three years. It is unfortunate, but I see what Turbonomic did. They gave us so many new bells and whistles that they think probably people aren't going to care because they're so much more savings to be had. However, for our particular environment, people like to see lifetime savings. That sort of puts a damper on things because now I need to go back to the old appliance, pull the reports using an API in a messy way, and then go to the new appliance. I don't even know what I am going to get from that. I don't know if it's going to be the Excel spreadsheet or just a dashboard, then somehow combine the two. While we haven't experienced it yet, when we do upgrade, we'll experience that problem. We know it is coming.

About two years.

Everything is manual. We don't automate anything, only because our environment isn't that big. If we were to set up all the groups as manual, it would actually take more time than just to go in and click go on each of the items after I have submitted a change request. We have about 180 VMs in Azure, not quite big enough to automate.

We broke even after year two. We definitely got our return on investment, but I think there is a lot more to come.

Turbonomic has helped optimize cloud operations and reduced our cloud costs significantly. Overall, we are at about 40 percent savings, and we spend about three million a year just in Azure. It reduces the size of the VMs, putting them into the right template for usage. People don't realize that you don't have to future-proof a virtual machine in Azure. You just need to build it for today. As the business or service grows, you can scale up or out. About 90 percent of all the costs that we've reduced has been from sizing machines appropriately.

The solution has absolutely helped reduce our IT-related CapEx and OpEx. The money that we have saved by minimizing our costs in the cloud allows us to spend more in the cloud versus buying physical hardware. We had at one point three data centers at approximately 18 offices with servers in them (all VMware). We are now down to three offices that have servers and a total of five complete servers. That is all been directly related to our savings in Azure and the ability to continue building without exceeding what we have previously spent. We budget three million a year. If I can shave 30 to 40 percent off of that, then we can build 30 to 40 percent bigger in Azure.

Turbonomic has saved a lot of human resource time and cost involved in monitoring and optimizing our estate by not having physical hardware because we don't have to deal with stale disks or power outages since it is hosted in the cloud. We had servers in 18 offices that required physical contact to replace a disk or troubleshoot a network connection. We had power issues, air conditioning issues, and network issues as well as having an ISP drop and having a backup ISP drop. I don't even know if I can calculate how much we've been able to save by moving most of that to Azure. Now, we still have outages in Azure, but Azure is way more stable than any physical environment we could build by a long shot. 

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.

We have monitoring tools out there that can tell us things that Turbonomic can tell us. I think the difference is the ability to just click a button and have it happen versus having to do it manually as well as checking the costs. While we could use a monitoring tool, we wouldn't be able to track our costs, and that's been a big impact to the company because we've saved a lot of money. So, if someone said, "Hey, we've got this monitoring tool, and we want to have you decide between Turbonomic and this monitoring tool." I wouldn't even look at the monitoring tool. I would say, "We are going to stay with Turbonomic."

We are installing the Kubernetes version of Turbonomic now. Then, it will be able to see application issues when they come up. Once we transitioned to Turbonomic version 8, we will be able to see the application side of things, which we were not able to see before.

Application performance wasn't even something we considered until Turbonomic 8 was announced and revealed to us. This will open a whole new door for us in terms of savings that we probably never even considered in the past.

I am pretty impartial to Turbonomic. I have not used anything to optimize cloud previously, but I'm going to base my rating solely on the support that we have received, the engagements that we had, the attention to detail, and the overall feel of the company and the interactions in the software. I would rate it as a 10 (out of 10).

Currently, we're doing migrations for older versions of Windows, both in the Azure Cloud and on-prem in our VMware vCenters. We use this tool to do comparisons between the current and future workloads and what would they look like, based on the usage. So, it is kind of a rightsizing exercise or rightsizing, either downsizing or upsizing, depending on the requirements. We just put all that information into Turbonomic, and it builds us out a new VM, exactly the size that we need, based on the trending and analysis. Then, you can also put in some factors, saying, "Look, it was Windows 2008, and we're going to windows 2019, or whatever. We're going to grow the database by X amount." This tool helps you do some of the analysis in order for you to get the right size right out-of-the-box. We love that.

I oversee a lot of stuff, so I don't really get an opportunity to go in there to point and click. We have people who do that.

It is doing Azure Cloud and VMware. Turbonomic understands the resource relationships at each of these layers and the risks to performance for each. You can compartmentalize your most critical workloads to make sure that they are getting the required resources so the business can continue to run, especially when we get hit by a lot of work at once. 

The solution provides us with a single platform that manages the full application stack. In our decision to go with this solution, this was critical. We had so many vCenters and physical clusters out there. We had virtual and physical machines all over the place. Turbonomic was the way we were able to centralize all our vCenters and get a good picture of what is going on in the environment. It was all over the place without it, so there was no way that we could centralize and work on getting off of some of the older hardware platforms that we were on and start moving to converged, then eventually hyper-converged. This tool allowed us to take a good look at our environment and decide how we were going to size those workloads into those new areas, off of the old blade chassis and old standalone systems, to the more modern hyper-converged systems.

In our organization, it is optimizing application performance as a continuous process that is beyond human scale. The reason is because there are times of the year that we have these big hits. It is like if you were Verizon and you were to sell all your cell phones during the Christmas time. Well, we have a very similar thing here at our company, where we have a period of time we basically shut the business down. We have to give critical resources to critical applications, giving them the resources that they need in order to function. In order for us to do that, we are able to take critical workloads and put them off into their own area, then determine how much we have to take from the rest of the resources, which we take from the rest of the systems in order to put it into new clusters or systems. That is super critical for us every year.

We use it for management and rightsizing of our platforms, specifically for migration activities, because we're always doing it. The migration has been the biggest thing that I personally use.

There are a number of tools that we use in it. Some of the things that I request are the data dumps. They write some kind of scripts or something inside there where they are actually able to pull for me CSV files. Then, I can go in, take all that information, and build a master gold list for my migration activities. 

Everything that I ask for, I get. I don't know what they are clicking nor do I know what they're doing, but when I request it, I get it. There are all sorts of different ideas and scenarios that I put forth to the developers.

Turbonomic provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. While I'm not in there banging around on the tool all the time, I can tell you that I do very much benefit from it. On Monday, I was getting additional information from the Turbonomic guys.

We use the solution’s automation mode to continuously assure application performance by having the software manage resources in real-time. 

There are a few things that we did notice. It does kind of seem to run away from itself a little bit. It does seem to have a mind of its own sometimes. It goes out there and just kind of goes crazy. There needs to be something that kind of throttles things back a little bit. I have personally seen where we've been working on things, then pulled servers out of the VMware cluster and found that Turbonomic was still trying to ship resources to and from that node. So, there has to be some kind of throttling or ability for it to not be so buggy in that area. Because we've pulled nodes out of a cluster into maintenance mode, then brought it back up, and it tried to put workloads on that outside of a cluster. There may be something that is available for this, but it seems very kludgy to me.

I would like an easier to use interface for somebody like me, who just goes in there and needs to run simple things. Maybe that exists, but I don't know about it. Also, maybe I should be a bit more trained on it instead of depending on someone else to do it on my behalf.

There are some things that probably could be made a little easier. I know that there is a lot of terminology in the application. Sometimes applications come up with their own weird terminology for things, and it seems to me that is what Turbonomic did. 

Three years.

I have never had a problem with it. The product is a little over anxious at times.

When we did the rollout in that phased approach, it was not difficult at all to roll in new technologies. They converged and hyper-converged into Turbonomic. So, it's definitely scalable. It moved right into the company pretty easily.

There are quite a few people using it, mostly for operations type of work. There are probably 25 users from operations, support, the performance team, and performance planning.

I have worked personally with Turbonomic, one of their guys, on some of this stuff. I haven't talked to him in a while, but he helped us develop a lot. The support for Turbonomic is incredible. 

Their technical support is excellent. By far, they are probably the best. It's probably why I am sitting here talking today, because I have to give these guys top props. I think the employee enthusiasm about this product is absolutely top-notch. It would probably be a great place to work.

I've worked with the Tier 1 support and their consultants. We had a consultant here for a year who was absolutely a top-notch fellow. He just became part of the team. He wanted to learn how we were doing things and tool the application to do what we needed it to do, which he did. He also left great instructions. A lot of his legacy is still there and being used today. 

We were using a combination of vROps and VMware. We were also using BMC TrueSight, which we still use today. There are a couple of others out there, because the network team uses a few things. There is all sorts of stuff that I think they were kind of hog-tying together to make them work.

Some of these solutions are ingrained in our processes and have been around literally forever. So, there isn't the staff or the resources right now to rewrite a lot of these things. Currently, we do kind of a side-by-side comparison, and I believe some folks have written some ways to integrate the new data from Turbonomic into the old way of doing things. That's just a culture change at the company. It's just a big place that has been around for a long time, which works slowly.

This solution was brought to us by one of our AVPs. She had worked at HPE, and we didn't know about it. She said, "Let's look at this," because apparently she used it at HPE. We looked at it, and said, "Ah, this is great." Then, we went with it.

Turbonomic is more customizable with a lot more features. 

Even though you can turn on automation in VMware, it's not very good. It's kludgy and has a tendency to break things, where the autobalance of workload management that Turbonomic does within VMware is much better than the VMware tools which are designed for this. That may change, because VMware seems to be doing great with this. However, for right now, Turbonomic is the only way to go. 

TrueSight is just straight up what you see is what you get.

I went to the training when they first rolled it out, but I wasn't involved in the setup.

They did the setup in sections. So, they started off with the lower environments and some of the clusters out there that really needed a lot of attention, mostly blade servers and such. So, it was a gradual rollout. I think the entire rollout was somewhere in the area of a year to a year and a half. However, to get it fully running, where we could use this solution to our benefit, that was at least six months.

We use scheduling in real-time for implementing the solution’s actions as well as manual execution, which is when we schedule for a later date to change activities. We have had to enable or disable certain things. It seems to do that just fine.

We used Turbonomic for everything to do with the setup. On our side, it required about five FTEs, who were engineering and operations personnel. There were folks who were creating the design and where it would be rolled out. That design was passed down to the operations folks who were actually implementing everything. So, it was done in phases.

We only have two engineers doing maintenance, a primary and a backup, and this is like their extracurricular activity.

The ROI would be in the return of hardware, specifically for a lot of the older hardware where we start to go into the converged systems. That is where we are seeing our ROI. We are getting rid of that old, junky hardware, starting to integrate and align things into one specific way of managing all our workloads, but not on old hardware. If anything, the ROI is end of life hardware elimination.

Also, we see ROI in extended support agreements (ESA) for old software. Migration activities seem to be where Turbonomic has really benefited us the most. It's one click and done. We have new machines ready to go with Turbonomic, which are properly sized instead of somebody sitting there with a spreadsheet and guessing. So, my return on investment would certainly be on currency, from a software and hardware perspective.

Turbonomic provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation. Our capacity and performance team use this solution as part of other tools that they utilize.

The solution provides application-driven prioritization, with its AppDynamics integration, to show us how top business applications and transactions are performing. If Turbonomic comes back and tells us, "Hey, this application needs more resources. Or, you're coming up onto a period where it will need more resources. Start planning now." We have certainly used it for that and will continue to use it for that. We have actually used it for troubleshooting a couple of times, saving us 25 percent when it comes to performance-based issues.

We have seen a 25 percent reduction in tickets opened for application issues.

Turbonomic has definitely helped to save human resource time and cost involved in monitoring and optimizing our estate. It has automated a lot of things. We have saved 30 to 35 percent in human resource time and cost, which is pretty substantial. We don't have a big workforce here, so we have to use all the automation we can get.

We did an architectural review. We had to look at other options, but I don't know exactly what those were.

Some of the tools which already exist are not that great. They really need to up their game if they're going to keep up with something like Turbonomic.

If you have a big shop, and it's scattered all over the place, then definitely take a look at this tool. Make sure you take a look at this tool because there is probably fit for purpose licensing for any size organization. It's a great automation process.

Turbonomic shows application metrics and estimates the impact of taking a suggested action based on its input from AppDynamics. So, we plug it into AppDynamics, then AppDynamics and Turbonomic seem to work together for that. 

It knows what business-critical applications we have, but I don't think it manages anything specifically within the application itself. It is mostly just resource-driven.

As money starts to get tight and budgets start to get really scrutinized, I think people are going to have to start looking at using Turbonomic to help optimize cloud operations to reduce cloud costs.

We are going to continue to use it going forward. I just don't know at what level. There are a lot of changes being made to the infrastructure, so it's going to depend on the tools and things that become available, like VCF as well as all the products that they have built-in through vROps, enhanced vROps, and things that already come with the software.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10). Personally, there is a lot that it does that a regular person like me does not have the time to sit down and dig into it. We expect things to be a little bit more automated. That is why I gave it an eight. I would give it a 10 (out of 10) if I got in there and it's like, look, click, click, and click. However, I don't know if there is that kind of a comfort level here yet to just let this thing go and have its day with the place.

The primary reason we initially got it was to help us to right-size all of our VMs, to make sure that they were the appropriate size for the amount that they were being used. That was the biggest push to get this, and we implemented it. 

We have also discovered that Turbonomic can automatically suspend virtual machines that were on a schedule. For example, in the afternoons and the evenings when a VM wasn't going to be used, it could just be shut down, so that we wouldn't be charged eight to 10 hours of compute time, per machine, that wasn't going to be used at all during that time. That's been pretty useful. 

We're also using it to help us determine the reserved instances that we need. We haven't purchased the reserved instances yet but we're using Turbonomic's suggested reserved instance purchasing algorithms to assist us in finding the right balance for the number of RIs that we want to purchase.

It has provided us with a pretty good deal of savings on the front-end, helping us to correctly size VMs that were over-provisioned. We were paying a lot for VMs that really didn't need to be as big as they were. There has been a pretty drastic decrease in compute and cloud spends, due to either making the changes suggested by Turbonomic, or letting Turbonomic make the changes. That, coupled with using the suspend functionality to suspend machines that are not being used, pulled down our cloud spend a good bit.

The solution also provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation. When you check in daily, it does evaluations on where your VMs and your infrastructure stand on that day. As a VM starts becoming more utilized, it will let you know to start planning on upgrading the machine because it's starting to show some extra usage that may grow beyond its capacity.

The right-sizing is the most valuable feature. It constantly lets you know if a machine is being over-utilized or under-utilized, so that you can make it the appropriate size for what you need it for.

It also brings up a list of machines and if something is under-provisioned and needs more compute power it will tell you, "This server needs more compute power, and we suggest you raise it up to this level." It will even automatically do it for you. In Azure, you don't have to actually go into the cloud provider to resize. You can just say, "Apply these resizes," and Turbonomic uses some back-end APIs to make the changes for you.

The way they evaluate reserved instances could use some polishing. The people that make decisions on what to buy are a bit confused by how it's laid out. I don't know if that's the fault of Turbonomic, or if that's just the complexity of reserved instances that Microsoft has created. It's not really that confusing for me, but for some people it's a little bit confusing. Trying to explain it to them is a bit tricky as well. We get to a point of impasse where we just accept that they don't really fully understand it, and that I can't fully explain it either. It would help if Turbonomic could simplify it or clarify it, and help non-technical people to understand what's going on and how the reserve instances are being calculated and what they apply to.

We've been using Turbonomic for about two-and-a-half years.

The stability is good. We've never had any issues with the server running and doing what it's supposed to do. It's never crashed. I've never had an issue bringing up the user interface. Nothing has ever caused any issues.

I think it would scale very well. Our size is in the medium range, but based on the way I see it working, I don't think it matters what size your cloud infrastructure would be. I think it would handle it very well.

In our company, Turbonomic is monitoring pretty much all of our machines in the Azure cloud. If they're in AWS, those are not managed. That's a separate side of the house and they don't want to have their stuff managed by Turbonomic. But we use it to manage everything from size to suspending, for all of our Azure-based machines.

As we move forward, we'll be using it more. We're going to look into using the suspension feature to suspend more VM. As we start getting comfortable with reserved instances, we'll probably use it to help us gauge how many reserved instances we need to buy.

I had to use their technical support when I set up the suspensions process. They were good. They did a good job. They got back with me fairly quickly and they were able to walk me through the process of how to configure it. They took the time to explain it very well. They even walked me through the process to make sure I understood how it works. As simple as a suspend of a VM might seem to be, initially, when you look at how it works in Turbonomic, it's not super-simple.

We didn't have a solution in place at all.

I was working for the company when they implemented Turbonomic but I wasn't part of the project that implemented it. I have since taken over one of the primary roles in utilizing it and we've deployed an updated version of it. I have a co-manager who uses it as well, on the same level as me. We back each other up on it.

That's something where there is room for improvement: upgrades. We have deployed the newer version, version 8 of Turbonomic. The problem is that there is no way to upgrade between major Turbonomic versions. You can upgrade minor versions without a problem, but when you go from version 6 to version 7, or version 7 to version 8, you basically have to deploy it new and let it start gathering data again. That is a problem because all of the data, all of the savings calculations that had been done on the old version, are gone. There's no way to keep track of your lifetime savings across versions.

Maybe there's a way that they can go and retrieve those specific bits of data, but so far I haven't seen how that happens. I would like to see them make major version upgrades work, first of all, because you can't currently upgrade to a major version. You have to deploy it to a new server. But at the very least, if we have to deploy it to a new server, give us a way to pull in that lifetime savings information, and track the information they've built up. We've had the same one for almost two years and it would be nice to keep all that tracking information for future reference.

I'm not involved in any of the billing, but my understanding is that is fairly expensive. 

It would be great if the price of the solution would scale with the amount of money that you are saving in the cloud. If the solution itself cost, say, $300,000 over the course of three years, it should be saving you $750,000 in cloud spend. They should make it worth it. At this point, I don't think there's any built-in tool to show you if the price that you're paying for Turbonomic is worth the cost savings that you're getting from it.

Or maybe the licensing and pricing could be done in tiers. If you had 100 virtual machines in the cloud, they would sell you licensing for 100 machines, and then 500, and then 1000. It would help if they did it in tiers so that you're not paying a massive amount of money for Turbonomic as a whole, and not saving as much as you were hoping.

I don't think Turbonomic provides you with a single platform that manages the full application stack. It manages a lot of the infrastructure stuff, Layer 1 through Layer 3 of the OSI model. It's mostly focused on infrastructure and making sure your infrastructure isn't over-provisioned. I wouldn't say it could all the way through the application.

Optimizing application performance on a continuous process is beyond the scope of a human to be able to do on a consistent basis. In other words, if you have 20 virtual machines, it's reasonable that a human could watch the utilization and determine size changes as needed, but if you're getting into hundreds of virtual machines, it becomes a task that's beyond the ability of a person to do by himself. It's a question of scale. As you get into hundreds of VMs, it becomes too tedious to keep track of and it becomes very time-consuming as well. Having said that, we don't use Turbonomic for that. We don't use it to manage any applications. We only use it to manage virtual machines.

We have only just started using containers. We haven't gotten into letting Turbonomic manage those containers. That's the only other thing that we would probably use it for at this point: managing the containerization. We use it right now for just cloud. We're pretty solid on on-prem because we've been doing a lot of migration of our on-prem stuff to the cloud. So we actually have a lot of compute resources available on-prem and we're not really worried about running into any resource issues.

Before Turbonomic, there was no person or group of people managing those aspects of our environment that it manages for us, but if there had been then, obviously, it would have reflected time savings at this point.

We pretty much use it only for load balancing between hosts.

We're a payroll company and Turbonomic is really important for us from about November until March, each year, because our end-of-year processing increases our load by six to seven times. That's especially true in November and December when companies are running their last payrolls. If we're going to be losing any customers, they definitely have to finalize everything all at one shot. In addition, companies that pay out bonuses at the end of the year also have to be running all these extra payrolls. There are a slew of reasons for extra payrolls at that time of year. They may need to do some cleanup if they messed up something and didn't do so all year long. At that point, they have to do it before December 31st. And after December 31st is the beginning of tax preparation, so our systems are very heavily utilized.

It does a great job year-round, but we're in a situation where we have plenty of resources during most of the year, but at year-end, depending on how busy it gets, it can overwhelm the systems if you're not careful, depending on where a VM sits, on which host.

We have parts of our payroll engine that run pretty hot, depending on what's happening. Those pieces of the payroll engine and the SQL servers tend to overrun a server pretty quickly, if you're not careful. But Turbonomic always does a great job of making sure that that is not happening.

Our company is growing like a monster. Even during COVID we've been growing, where a lot of companies, unfortunately, are not. Because we've gained a lot of new customers during COVID, because other payroll companies have gone under or because our pricing model is good, the result has been a lot more load on our systems. And even though we've had much more load, Turbonomic has done a great job of keeping everything balanced. We're able to completely utilize our systems before having to introduce more hardware.

Its whole job is to manage our business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources. In my opinion, applications are applications. When your application is running, it's reserving a piece of memory, it's utilizing the CPU, and it's utilizing the network interface. There is a certain limit to the hardware that's available to it. Applications need watching. If we were to use the pieces where it digs down inside the application, it would probably even do better, but we're not using those pieces yet. In the end, no matter what the application is doing, it's using resources, either on a regular basis or on a random basis, and Turbonomic looks for patterns and spikes and how long these patterns last. It looks at the risk of a spike only happening for 30 seconds versus 30 minutes. It makes decisions to move other things off or move off the application in question. It does a great job keeping that balance.

We hardly do any manual execution. Maintenance windows are when it's probably most important to us. For example, when we're upgrading or doing a repair on an ESX host, we're really taxing the other servers because those CPUs and all the I/O capability on that host are lost. That's when it's even more important for Turbononic to keep the rest of the system healthy enough and to keep the system going without showing any degradation. It helps us while we're doing maintenance.

It provides a proactive approach to avoiding performance degradation, absolutely. It always looks at history and looks for patterns. In a lot of cases, it knows that there's a scheduled task or that, on average, a customer is always like hopping on around three o'clock. After a week or two of seeing the exact same things happening—although that timeframe really depends on how big your organization is, the bigger your organization, the longer it takes to understand the full dynamic—it really understood all the patterns and all the schedules. In the past, we'd see systems starting to get a little hotter and then a little hotter still. With Turbonomic, that issue would just go away by shuffling stuff around. After a week or two we wouldn't see that thing getting warm anymore. When that application or server got hot, it never put that host into any kind of jeopardy anymore, not even a little bit where we thought, "Hey, we should look at that."

We have definitely seen a reduction in tickets open for application performance issues. In some cases we get tickets for performance problems because the developer wrote crappy code and wants to blame us in infrastructure. But I can show them, "Look, we're not overloaded." They look at some of the logs we provide them that show that the servers are operating at full capacity and usually they find that there's some kind of weird issue with a database query that they wrote. The solution has definitely reduced tickets for application performance problems a little bit, but it has mostly decreased troubleshooting time.

It's helped us to always meet our SLAs. In previous companies I've worked at, the company was either so cheap, or the boss didn't understand how the infrastructure works, that we got to the point where we were over utilizing our hardware. That's where Turbonomic really makes a difference because without it you can be way over-committing what you have versus what you need. You always have servers that are sitting there idle, so it's best if you can balance the ones that run hot with the ones that run idle and shuffle around use of them based on what you're utilizing. If you don't have Turbonomic, then whatever boxes happen to be on there could be in overdrive to the point where you start ballooning and paging. That can cause a denial of service because you don't have enough resources to handle the workload. It's really great to try to maximize every inch of your infrastructure, to make sure you're utilizing everything to its fullest capacity.

Whoever is on call loves Turbonomic because if we didn't have it we'd be getting alerted much more often. That's especially true at three o'clock in the morning when some backup or something that's not even important is running and the pager will go off because it hits some threshold for too long. Turbonomic sees, "Okay, this server does this at this time and it's going to use a lot more resources than anybody else," and it just shuffles everything away.

I only deal with the infrastructure side, so I really couldn't speak to more than load balancing as the most valuable feature for me. It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. It always keeps things in perfect balance. Most of the time it tends to be our SQL servers. 

When I first started at this company, only the boss knew about Turbonomic, and he had totally forgotten to even mention to me that they had it. They weren't using any other software like that. I was always curious and I kept asking all the other guys about how the system always stays so balanced and that we never seem to have a host that runs really hot, under any circumstances. Finally, in my first review, I asked him, "What are you guys doing there in the background that you haven't told me about, that keeps the system so balanced?" And he said, "Oh yeah, we're using Turbonomic." For whatever reason, they didn't have a DNS entry for it. The guy who put it in, he always just connected to it by IP, and he totally forgot about it because it just works. You don't have to go in there and do a lot to it unless there is a problem, and we never have a problem.

Also, since we're only using it for the infrastructure part, it's not telling us anything about the application. It just tells us about the server that is running the application. But if the application is getting bogged down because you're starting to see disk I/O problems, it does a fabulous job of recommending. "Hey, let's move this here or do that there." In every case that I can ever remember, it has always done a great job.

It doesn't really require any maintenance. Just set it up and let it do its job.

On the infrastructure side, they've been doing it long enough. But until I get a better use case for the cloud, the only thing I can think of is that I'd like to see it work with SevOne, when you're doing true monitoring, so that the software packages work together. 

It would be good for Turbonomic, on their side, to integrate with other companies like AppDynamics or SolarWinds or other monitoring software. I feel that the actual monitoring of applications, mixed in with their abilities, would help. That would be the case wherever Turbonomic lacks the ability to monitor an application or in cases where applications are so customized that it's not going to be able to handle them. There is monitoring that you can do with scripting that you may not be able to do with Turbonomic. So if they were able to integrate better with third-party monitoring software—and obviously they can't do them all, but there are a few major companies that everybody uses—and find a way to hook into those a little bit more, the two could work together better.

We were actually a customer of theirs even before it was Turbonomic, back when it was VMTurbo. It's been at least 10 years.

I've never ever had it crash or go down.

Turbonomic is one of the best software solutions ever written. You just set it up and you only go in there when you're having a problem. The truth is that we don't have that many problems anymore. The only time we had a problem was shortly after I first started, because none of the guys even paid attention to it because it always did its job. We ended up having to change our vCenter server. We moved from a physical box to an appliance and when we did that, the vCenter had to have a new name. Because none of the guys, other than my boss, were around when Turbonomic was set up, they didn't log into it because it always did its job. They totally forgot about it. And for something like two weeks we were seeing some goofiness where boxes were getting hot. I messaged, "Hey, did you put that change in Turbonomic?" and he replied, "Did I put what in what?" Other than that, we just don't have to go in there. It works so well that we just don't do anything to it.

We have it set up to throw out some alerts if things get too haywire, but it didn't even get to that point. We like to be very proactive in keeping our systems very low in resources. Had we let the problem go on a little bit longer, it probably would have thrown out an alert, but the problem was that we didn't have the vCenter in there.

At the first shop I worked at where we got Turbonomic, we had over 60 hosts and it did a magnificent job. In my current company we're only monitoring 15 or 20. I can't see it having a problem. The more servers you have, the more return you get on it.

In terms of increasing our usage, we're always pushing the developers to do stuff with it. The problem for us is that we're owned by a parent company and IT infrastructure works for and reports to the parent company. But the IT development software group reports to the actual company. They're under a totally different chain of command, so we can't really dictate anything that they do. All we can do is make recommendations, but their director has his own plans. We try to show them the benefits, but it's a lot of work to sit down and configure it, which is not worth it if they're not going to use it. And we have enough other projects that we have to work on, so we have to pick our battles.

Their tech support is awesome. We've never had any problems with them. But to be honest with you, we haven't really had to call them in 10 years, except for one time when I called them because I couldn't find our license key. It was not about supporting the software, per se.

We were trying to use VMware's version of it, but it's a pile of junk. It doesn't work. It just sees that something is busy and moves it somewhere where it's slower. Turbonomic is better because it trends and it looks at history. If it knows that something is only going to run hot for 30 seconds, but it's going to take 45 seconds to move everything around, then it's not worth moving. You don't get that out of VMware's product. It just saw, "Okay, so it's hot, start moving." But the problem is that when you start doing the move, you're also now utilizing even more resources, and you could save on those when the move is going to take longer than the actual task that's causing the spike. Turbonomic sees that and it doesn't necessarily move stuff just for the sake of moving it. It knows that this is something that happens every day at this time and we're just going to ride it out.

We were actually one of their first customers, when they were still ironing out all the wrinkles of their algorithm. My boss and I were both looking at it and seeing how it was shuffling stuff around non-stop. It couldn't even gather data at a point. It was already moving it somewhere else. We called in, took some notes, and they produced a new version. We did what felt like beta-testing even though it had been a production piece for a while. But they were very responsive and produced patches really quickly. The company was a really good company. They were really friendly, and they're always trying to deliver what they promise.

If you can't set this thing up then you shouldn't be in IT. We're only using it from the infrastructure side. You log into it, you set your passwords, import your vCenter into it, put in the credentials, and tell it what vCenters you want it to monitor. And it just starts gathering data.

We did our setup many years ago and, back then, we had a guy there walking us through it because they were a brand-new company. They really gave us the white-glove treatment. I think we may have spent two hours on it, but most of that was talking. If you buckle down and just shut up and do it, it would probably take 15 or 20 minutes. It only takes one person to implement it.

We have six guys who use Turbonomic now. Some are higher-level guys and we have our entry-level guys, but everybody has access to it and looks at it if they need to.

I don't know what we would have bought if we didn't have it, so it's hard to say how much we have saved. We may have bought more hardware thinking we needed more hardware when we didn't. We just needed to shuffle stuff around. So it's hard to say what we would have done if we didn't have it, and if we didn't have that reporting telling us, "Hey, this is where the problem is".

If you're a super-small business, it may be a little bit pricey for you. The problem with small businesses is that the owners are super-cheap and they don't want to spend anything unless they absolutely have to. It's really hard to explain this solution to people with that mentality. But you can run more servers on less physical hardware because it will keep things balanced based on your usage patterns. 

But in large, enterprise companies where money is, maybe, less of an issue, Turbonomic is not that expensive. I can't imagine why any big company would not buy it, for what it does.

If you didn't have it and you went out and bought a whole new server, you're talking about spending something like $7,000 with Microsoft for a decent license, and then you're talking about a VMware license as well, which I would venture is in the $5,000 to $7000 range. And memory is so expensive all the time. And another server is going to cost, say, $10,000 to $15,000. If you do that twice over a couple of years, Turbonomic will have paid for itself. And that's not to mention the fact that it's also made things so much better for you because it has kept the system stable. I don't think Turbonomic is expensive, in that sense.

I put in a lot of expense and time in the very beginning, because I was trying to learn it. But if you're smart, you'll look back and see how well it's managing your systems now and you'll feel like a fool that you went out and bought all that new hardware in the past, because you probably could have gotten away without it. If you're truly maximizing your systems, the way that Turbonomic does, you can get away with less hardware with the same infrastructure because it's maximizing the hardware better. And that keeps your licensing costs down.

We did a lot of research, especially at that time, and there aren't really a whole lot of other software solutions out there, at least nothing that's comparable to Turbonomic. There are other companies that do something similar, but they don't have anywhere near the level of complexity or the type of algorithms that Turbonomic is using to keep the system stable. 

I don't remember what we evaluated at the time, other than VMware, because everybody works with Vmware, but the other solutions we had looked at were not even in the realm of Turbonomic, so we didn't evaluate them for more than a day.

If you're looking into Turbonomic, just do it. You will not regret it.

The biggest thing that I've learned is that you don't realize how much your hardware can do until it's truly balanced. Some people operate foolishly and they just won't step up because they're being cheap. Other people want to be ultra-conservative because they don't ever want to have a problem, but using software like this, you realize that there is a balance. If you trust the software, you get to utilize your hardware better while still feeling like you have those reserves available without putting yourself at risk by being foolish.

It provides a single platform that can manage the full application stacks, but we're not using that aspect. Our developers are not interested in using it yet. We're in the process of looking for a new monitoring software as well, and I'm pushing heavily for them to look at SevOne but we've had some unfortunate experiences with the people at SevOne. If we go down that route and start using SevOne, my boss is going to lean on them much more heavily to start integrating with Turbonomic.

It only handles virtualization right now, for us. It's probably going to start handling cloud soon, because we're just starting to migrate things there. We have some things in the cloud, but we're looking at moving quite a few other servers up to Azure. The solution understands the resource relationships perfectly, on-prem. From what I have seen so far of the cloud piece, it seems to understand that, mostly, although the cloud is still fairly new compared to on-prem infrastructure. I have no doubt that they're going to make huge strides and make that part even better. I don't know that it's as good in the cloud as it is on-prem. We have used it a little bit in some testing, but we haven't run it in production for any long periods of time. But we're really hoping it reduces our cloud cost at some point, because those cloud vendors really take advantage of every ounce of I/O that you use.

Honestly, on a scale of one to 10, I would give Turbonomic a 12. It's way better than a lot of software. Other solutions look really shiny—and if you're like a fish and all you care about is like looking at something shiny, that's one thing—but when those products are delivered, they don't do half of what they say they're going to do. They'll say, "Oh, that's in the next release," or "Oh, we're working on that". Turbonomic was very upfront about what their software did. Yes, they had a few bugs, but they were also just opening at the time. We expected that in the beginning because it was a brand-new company. But what they told you it would do, it did, and it did it well, too. Nowadays, that's hard to find.

We implemented this solution in our company and we also implement it for our clients. We use it because it connects to monitoring tools over APIs and if you have a monitoring solution, it removes data intelligently. Our aim is to optimize our customers' systems. The solution also offers insight into the financial impact of an event. We are partners with IBM which purchased Turbonomic earlier this year, and we are resellers of Turbonomic. I'm the company CEO/CIO. 

The help desk analyzes metrics events and Turbonomic tells you exactly what is wrong and how to resolve it. The solution improves the function of the help desk and saves time by making repairs quickly.

Optimization is a valuable feature. For example, if I have eASICs running and several VMwares running, it shows me how to optimize the system and get the best out of it. It reduces the cost of the two systems. I like that the solution integrates almost automatically with other products.

The solution could be improved by having all interfaces together and I'd really like to see more interfaces. 

I've been using this solution for two months. 

We haven't had any stability issues, the solution is running well.

Scalability is fine. We're using the product extensively with deployment of almost 54,000 systems. We receive a lot of alerts from those systems and do a lot of monitoring, so it's used constantly. 

The technical support is now done by IBM.

The initial setup is very straightforward. You execute an application or a script, depending on whether you're running it in Linux or Windows, and then you deploy the containers. It's pretty much one command and then everything is automatic. It took us about 20 minutes. 

We already had a good return in the first couple of weeks. 

Licensing costs are middle of the road; you need to take into account what the solution delivers to the customer. If it's running automatic remediation then it saves a lot of money for an organization. 

This tool is excellent for a CFO, while other tools are geared more towards a CIO. This tool has a different market. We're currently working in Europe, carrying out implementations in both Italy and Portugal, and we're starting on a new deployment project in Dubai next week. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We looked to this product to help us to right-size our virtual machines and containers. Most people who request virtual machines tend to request more resources than they need, and most of the time it's hard to prove that they don't.

Our environment is entirely on-premises. We have virtual machines and Kubernetes running on some of those VMs. We also have plans to go to the cloud with some workloads in the future, so it's good to have this tool to help get the sizing just right when the time comes to pull the plug.

Turbonomic has been helping us use our resources more efficiently, the challenge we currently face internally is getting people to allow the servers to be turned off to make the changes recommended.

I also like the planning tool, which is helpful to make sure we have enough capacity for failing over one datacenter to the other in case of disaster, while still maximizing what we already have and helping to keep us from making host purchases we don't need yet. It's nice not having to make all those calculations on my own.

At the moment, I have only really had the opportunity to manage virtual machines with it.

We're starting to let it look at our Kubernetes workloads as well.

The automation and orchestration components are definitely the best part, as you can tell it what it can do and when, and just let it be. However, I haven't reached that point yet. That is the plan for the future though.

I really like the planning tool so I can make sure we have enough resources for upcoming projects that require servers, while still having enough resources for our disaster recovery failover needs.

The reporting feature could be made a little more seamless with the rest of the tool. It would be nice to be able to share and print the reports a little more easily.

Some features are only available via changes to the deployment YAML, and it would be better to have them in the UI.

The upgrade process is a bit tedious, but I know the team is working on that.

The ability to set the scope at the dashboard level and let it flow down to all the widgets you add would be amazing. Having to select the scope per widget is a bit tedious.

We have been using Turbonomic for just under a year.

It is pretty stable, we have not had issues with that.

Turbonomic seems scalable to me.

Technical support is where Turbonomic shines.

Lots of features are still in the works but the company really makes sure you have a lot of attention and support after the sale, which is sometimes hard to get. Most of the time, once a vendor has your money, you never hear from them again. However, I have had a great experience with post-sales support and a lot of hand-holding.

It is really well done on their part to make their customer happy.

We did not use a similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Deployed was completed in-house.

We have no ROI so far.

It's worth the time and money investment if you can afford it.

We evaluated VMware vROps before selecting Turbonomic.

It has a feature called "right-sizing". This makes sure that our virtual machines are sized properly so we don't have a lot of wasted resources, either too large or too small. This way, our machines function much better than they should.

We have a system where our developers automate machine builds, and that is constantly running out of resources. Turbonomic helps us with that, so I don't have to keep buying hardware. The developers always say, "They don't have enough. They don't have enough. They don't have enough," when they just configured it improperly. Therefore, Turbonomic helps us identify configuration issues on their side so it doesn't cost me money on the other end to buy resources that I don't really need.

The solution handles some of our applications and cloud as well as giving us some insight into the storage aspect. While we have other tools, Turbonomic does give me insight onto my storage utilization as well. That part helps us with the virtualization stack. Turbonomic understands the resource relationships at each of these layers and the risks to performance for each of them, which helps us be a little more at the front of the game, giving us a little more insights to be more ahead of what we need to do.

To an extent, the solution helps manage our business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources. Some of our business-critical apps are our large virtualization stacks, and that is what our developers develop on. These keep our development environment running optimally so they can continue to develop without having to wait for resources.

It does suggest actions. It let us know ahead of time: 

• If we need to increase hardware.
• If we're okay.
• If we need to decrease hardware.
• What to expect during peak season.

The most valuable feature is the right-sizing. For my maintenance weekend, I can schedule it to right-size a subset of VMs every month. That works perfectly for me. It goes out on its own and tells me which machines need to be changed, then it will perform that function. I don't have to do any manual intervention. It runs its own report in the background. 

Turbonomic tells me ahead of time to prevent resource starvation. Going into the console, it tells me whether actions can be taken, saying, "Do you want to do these now?" Then, I can push a button and Turbonomic will do them. Or, I could simulate a load by saying, "Well, I'm going to add this, what will happen?" It will then tell me what will happen, so I can know ahead of time.

It optimizes application performance as a continuous process that is beyond human scale.

The solution helps us with troubleshooting issues in certain virtual environments. It gives you good information so you can drill down to different levels. You can get information to help you troubleshoot issues that you are seeing, whether it be storage-related or virtual machine-related.

They could add a few more reports. They could also be a bit more granular. While they have reports, sometimes it is hard to figure out what you are looking for just by looking at the date.

They could update the look of the console.

There are some manual issues. When it comes to forecasting dollar amounts, you have to put in all these inputs. Some of the questions they ask are a little outside of the realm that any engineer should be putting in. If they could streamline that, the solution would be much better.

I have been using it for about two and a half years.

It is very stable. I don't think it has ever gone down unless it was something that we did. If you have a good system that is sized properly, then it works well.

The solution doesn't require any maintenance on our side.

We schedule for change windows because a lot of the times the recommended changes will require a restart. So, we have to do them when they don't affect anybody. For a lot of what we are using Turbonomic, it will suggest actions that require restarts, shutdowns, etc. Those need to be done off-hours.

It scales well. If you need to scale up, you just purchase more licenses.

We have 6,500 endpoints, which are 95 percent virtual and five percent cloud.

We have our operations team who use it sometimes. Operations gets the first call about performance improvements. If someone calls or opens a ticket with them, and says, "Oh, I need more resources," then they will log onto Turbonomic and see if a machine is underperforming for whatever reason. 

My team is managing the resources for right-sizing and forecasting,

We learned that all we have to do is engage the Turbonomic team, and they will help us get anything that we need done. They will make feature improvements if we request them. They are proactive when working with us.

Previously, we used something out-of-the-box or homegrown, in-house scripts.

Upgrading the solution is straightforward. It is pretty easy.

When we are notified of an upgrade, feature pack, or patch, it is like a two or three step function to get to the next level. It is very non-intrusive and easy. It takes 35 to 40 minutes to upgrade or apply a patch, and the solution doesn't go down.

We keep it because we see ROI. For example, I had an issue recently, which was big, and Turbo helped me solve that problem. If we did not have this solution, it would have been a much bigger issue.

It has reduced our IT-related CapEx and OpEx, because you have a lot of people who complain that they need this and that. Those would be capital expenditures if we're buying more machines, and we really don't need them. So, we can just right-size a VM or an environment, and that pays for the capital and operational expenditures. The automation helps a lot with this as well. This has reduced our expenditures around 10 percent because I haven't bought anything in a while. I haven't needed to buy anything, except for replacements.

It has saved time. Without this application, I would have to do everything myself. That would take at least eight hours a month, because the right-sizing takes a couple hours, then I would have to prepare it.

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

We tested Turbonomic against VMware vROps. Both solutions will tell you, "Oh, you should do this or that. This is an issue. You can do this." However, at the time that we tested vROps, it was an older version. They weren't offering the ability to schedule right-sizing and automating it, where Turbonomic does. vROps would just alert you, so you would have to do the right-sizing yourself. Therefore, vROps would have been a bit more manual with more operational needs.

I target it at the cloud to get a baseline against other tools, e.g., which ones we are going to go with long-term. Turbonomic, in our cloud, points towards development environments, not production environments.

We are not really application-specific. However, it does work well with the monitoring and ensuring performance. I can identify a performance issue just by opening the dashboard, even if I am not necessarily looking for one.

I would give it an eight (out of 10). It is a really good product.

We're using it for placement automation. Turbonomic will look at the virtual machines that are on different hosts and it will say, "Hey, three are too many machines on this host. And this host doesn't have a lot of machines on it." It will place the virtual machines in a balanced way on different hosts and try to balance the hosts out as best it can.

We're also using it for CPU and RAM addition and automation: Do we need to add more memory or take away memory in the environment or look at a machine to see if it is being used to the best capacity?

We also use Turbonomic for planning. It takes a look at our environment and we can make plans, like if we want to put some of our environment into a cloud-based system, like Azure, it will tell us our costing.

We use it for about 4,000 machines.

Performance is something that should constantly be monitored and constantly be worked on. Turbonomic is doing that in the background, without me having to manually do it. It's a great help. It's monitoring something that I just physically couldn't do all by myself because the environment is too large. It's looking at the resources in any environment and taking snapshots of where things are. At the right time, it's adding or taking away resources, and that's helping make the environment more efficient.

Planning is another way it really helps because it gives us an idea of the cost to move. We wanted to move everything to the cloud. It helps us to figure out what it would look like and how Turbonomic could even help, if we want to do that. But more importantly, it gives us an idea of how much it would cost. We get a round figure of the cost involved.

It handles virtualization, cloud, on-premise, and storage for us. We're moving towards it handling applications. The solution understands the resource relationships at each of these layers and the risks to performance for each. It understands them and makes adjustments based on what's needed. It also lets us know, if we need to make some adjustments, where they are. It definitely does a good job with that. It's not only knowing where to put things, but it's doing it for us.

We use it for implementing scheduling of actions for change windows. We do that based on our service-level agreements. We have to have a certain level of uptime. We do things because of our change process and the way that we have systems going. It's best for us to do it at a scheduled time, when everybody knows that the system will be going through some type of change.

It helps us meet SLAs by making sure that the machine has the resources it needs to function properly. Also, when it does make changes, it does it during the SLA windows.

We also use Turbonomic to show application metrics and estimate the impact of taking a suggested action. We have it doing that based on things in clusters. We'll set something up in the cluster and then have it see if that cluster is being utilized to its fullest or if it's being over-utilized. It gives us visibility.

In addition, it helps optimize cloud operations and reduce our cloud costs. We're putting things on a certain type of storage and moving things to best fit our environment and give us the best cost for our environment. It will also give us an idea, before we put it there, of what the cost will be before we move it to Azure.

It saves me a lot of time because I don't have to do things to monitor the environment to see what machines need RAM or memory or need CPU taken away or added. It can do that for me. I would estimate it saves me 20 hours per month.

The automated memory balancing, where it looks at whether it's being used in the most efficient way and adds or takes away memory, is the best part. If it didn't do that, it would be something that I would have to do. We have too many machines for one person to do that. The automation helps me in that it is done in a really efficient way and a balanced way because of the policies. It really helps.

It provides specific actions that prevent resource starvation. If a machine needs more resources, it will use the automation policies to add resources so that machines get the resources that they need. And if they don't need them anymore, it will take them away.

It provides everything in one screen, one area. I'm able to see not only the planning, and not just the stuff that's on-premise, but things that are in the cloud. I can even narrow down to different applications. It does a lot in one pane. That was really important because we didn't have to go to three or four different products to find what Turbonomic had in one product. It really helps that Turbonomic is showing you efficiencies and the best way to keep things in the environment working properly, instead of me, or even me and co-worker, trying to do it. We just know that it's handling it better.

You can monitor an application and all the hosts and virtual machines that are connected to the application and it will give you an idea of how many resources it is using and what it is using. It also lets you know if it's over-utilized or under-utilized. It helps us to know if we're in an area where a machine might not perform the way we are expecting it to, because of the resources that it has or the resources it needs to have.

The planning and costing areas could be a little bit more detailed. When you have more than 2,000 machines, the reports don't work properly. They need to fix it so that the reports work when you use that many virtual machines.

I've been using Turbonomic for about one year.

It's very stable and works the way that it should.

It seems scalable, although I haven't scaled it up or taken anything away yet. We plan to use more storage. We're not using as much storage as we would like.

The support has been really good. The people that I've been working with have been really helpful. It's been working.

We used vRA from VMware. 

The initial setup of Turbonomic was straightforward. I worked with somebody from Turbonomic and we got an understanding of the environment and we worked together to get it installed and to get the placement working first. After the placement, we worked on changing and automating the addition of CPUs and RAM.

Something we need to do is make the solution aware of business-critical applications by understanding the underlying supply chain of resources. We need to make it aware of what's critical. We do that by setting up clusters and then setting certain policies on what is in each cluster. We separate critical things through clusters.