I have to admit I never used VMTurbo before. Heard a lot about them, read a fair deal about them, but never actually deployed their solutions myself. Let’s change that! And while I’m at it, let me write down my 2 cents on VMTurbo in this post…
So, VMTurbo first launched it’s offering in August 2010 and kept growing steadily. Their solution providing you the tools you need to utilize your virtual infrastructure at a much more efficient way compared to the resource monitoring and management your hypervisor brings you by default.
It will bring you great advantages like; less effort needed from your administrators to manually monitor and configure resources for your virtual infrastructure running your applications. And, it will create a more predicable performance for your applications! You will also benefit from being able to serve more workloads on your virtual infrastructure with less compute resources.
Quick deployment
Needless to say, I’m testing VMTurbo on a vSphere cluster. My homelab to be exact.
Using the OVA template, you should be up and running within minutes. I had to tone down the resources, used by the appliance, a notch. By default it’s willing to claim 4 vCPU’s and 16GB memory. No worries there in a common cluster, but within my lab environment, memory is scarce. 🙂
After deployment, we are ready to config VMTurbo to monitor my VMware environment. Good to see that a lot of other targets can be specified. Including support for various Cloud Management tools like vCD, CloudStack, OpenStack, VMM and public cloud offerings like AWS and Azure. It would be cool to see even more (custom) targets, making you less dependent on current supported targets/vendors.
Operations Management
I want to focus on operations management. The way I see it, it is a resource manager on steroids. What is cool, is that in addition to VMware DRS for example, it does not only leverage CPU and memory usage when making decisions on placement within a cluster… But it will also leverage the CPU ready queues, memory ballooning, swapping and latency. Next to those metrics it uses storage IO and network throughput. However, I would have to check if DRS leverages more metrics in vSphere 6.0 than it did in vSphere 5.x.
The operations management web GUI is a well responding GUI and provides a very clear overview on your virtual environment. For example the Inventory view:
The Supply Chain view is a very cool view which will show you the supply and demand relationships of your entities within your environment. The Workload chart will give you a single pane of glass overview on your workloads, and what they could benefit from a more desirable distribution.
VMTurbo can also be used to Deploy new virtual machines. VMTurbo will calculate the most ideal placement for your new virtual machine within your environment. Predefined virtual machine templates provided by VMTurbo can be used for common workloads.
The Planner should be consulted when you need a glimpse into the future for i.e. planned hardware expansions or large workload deployments. This is very nifty feature which allows you to predict resource behavior within your virtual environment.
The Policy view is used to analyse resource allocation and how it recommends or performs actions to these analyses. The Reports view is a obvious one, however it is a delight to be able to create reports this way. Very good usability!
For a bit more info on the product, be sure to check out this short intro:
https://youtu.be/KZz6xOnZ6YE
Conclusion
This is just a quick recap on VMTurbo’s Operations Management. I do love it now I have witnessed it for myself. A very cool resource management product which will not necessarily replace your monitoring tools like vROps, but will supplement them! I will definitely keep using VMturbo and explore it further. Start exploring VMTurbo for yourself; click here to start monitoring your infrastructure for free!
In future design projects, I will definitely consider the use of VMTurbo. For example; I’m sure it will be of great value to use reports on existing environments which will help you define necessary, optimized, resource calculations for you new designs.
Note: VMTurbo does provides a ROI calculator for you to convince your management if you need to do so. 😉
