Managing extensive virtualized infrastructure, such as hybrid cloud environments, presents unending challenges in administration and resource-allocation. Cloud management solutions are evolving quickly to offer IT professionals increasingly sophisticated tools for efficient management and monitoring of virtualized infrastructure. This article, which is part of a series developed by IT Central Station, the largest enterprise tech review site, looks at the choice between VMware vRealize and Turbonomic's Workload Management for Hybrid Cloud.

It offers representative comments about these two leading cloud management providers from enterprise IT professionals who published reviews on ITCentralStation.com. The reviews explore how vRealize and Turbonomics both offer value in terms of management, monitoring and cost savings. It also highlights a few areas where there’s room for improvement. IT Central Station has zero tolerance for fake reviews and uses a triple-validation process in order to ensure objective and authentic reviews from real users.

Improving Virtual Machine Management

IT Central Station members found both VMware vRealize and Turbonomic to be effective at making virtual machine (VM) management easier. Automation ranked high for Turbonomic, as Ian M., a Senior Systems Engineer at a logistics company, explained. He liked Turbonomic’s “automation of tasks to keep the resource loads on my ESX servers balanced.” Gary L., an AVP Systems Engineer at a financial services firm, highlighted Turbonomic’s “ability to automate and show what is being used and what is really needed.” Stephen B., a System Administrator at a software R&D company, referred to Turbonomic as enabling “complete hands-off management.”

Capacity planning emerged as a value point for several reviewers. John D. a Network Engineer at a retailer, found Turbonomic’s capacity planning to be beneficial to his organization.

For vRealize Operations (vROps), a Manager of FIS Server Computing at a university, noted, “We first used it for capacity management and planning. With that, we were looking at what's over-provisioned, under-provisioned, things of that nature.”

Load balancing and optimization gained the attention of Turbonomic users. Gary L. found that one of Turbonomic’s most useful features was “being able to link multiple clusters together to form a super cluster allows us to balance out our load as needed.” A Cloud Architect at a tech services company shared, “Turbonomic is a great tool that seeks to optimize your IT environment.”

VRealize rated highly for troubleshooting and proactive management. A Senior Virtualization Engineer at an engineering company said that vROps was “a great troubleshooting tool.” He added, “If you have enough management packs in it, you can see the entire supply chain all the way from storage to compute. It helps you see where exactly, potentially, the problem is happening.”  A Solutions Architect explained in his review that vROps allowed his team become more proactive. Jeff F., a Manager of Virtualization & Storage Management at an energy/utilities company put it like this: “It has helped us avoid outages or reduce outage time. Everything we're doing is proactive. If we weren't using our dashboards for management, being able to see where the issues are ahead of time, there’d be outages.”

Monitoring, Reporting and Alerting

Turbonomic and vRealize provide extensive VM monitoring as well as related reporting and alerting. Given the scale and complexity of today’s virtualized environments, these capabilities are essential for smooth, economical operations. In this context, Tom G., a Systems Engineer who uses Turbonomic, commented, “For us, the monitoring features, as well as the right-sizing recommendations and reports have been the most valuable. It helps us stay on top of the health of our virtual infrastructure, make near-real-time decisions on how to fine-tune and adjust our infrastructure, and lets us be proactive in our approach.” The Manager of FIS Server Computing who uses vROps added, “Currently, the most valuable features of the product are monitoring, capacity management and planning.”

Other observations about the respective solutions’ monitoring features included:

Saving Time and Money

Users of both Turbonomic and vRealize found the solutions to be major time and money savers. As a Technical Lead at a tech services company commented, with vRealize, “Provisioning time is reduced from two weeks to 60 minutes.” A Product Manager at a media company concurred in his review, pointing out, “We were able to reduce the delivery time of requesting a VM from three weeks to under 10 minutes using the vRealize Automation Suite.”

Financially, Ariel D., a Turbonomic-using IT Servers & Infrastructure Leader at a tech services company, offered the following point of view: “With Turbonomic Operations Manager [we] automated all environment virtualization infrastructure (Hyper-V, vSphere, XenServer) with one unique management console. We save our CAPEX [capital expense] working with a plan inside of Operations Manager when we change hardware by lifecycle or when we have new projects, we have a capacity planning with that.”

Room for Improvement

IT Central Station members also shared feedback on areas where Turbonomic and vRealize had “room for improvement.” A Cloud Architect felt that the Turbonomic UI could use some improvement, though he shared he was confident in the product’s next generation UI, based on a preview. vROps earned constructive feedback from the Manager of FIS Server Computing, who said, “We'd like to see more customizable things, more management packs.” Zane W., a Senior Virtualization Engineer at a tech company, wanted vROps to have more multi-tenant support.

You can read more reviews of cloud management solutions by downloading IT Central Station’s review roundup report.

[See what IT pros told IT Central Station about AWS vs Azure in an earlier article.