This second Tech Field Day 14 Preview post is focused on Turbonomic.

I must confess I know very

little about their solution and I am very anxious to hear more from these guys when I will meet them in
Boston: I did some research in the past few days about Turbonomic and I definitely feel I need to learn
more about thir product. Very much looking forward to be enlightened!
Coming from a vROPs background, I kind of assumed – most likely wrongly – that Turbonomic was a
direct competitor of VMware’s solution, but from what I have seen so far, although there are for sure
some similarities and overlapping areas, here we are talking about two completely different beasts, so
I will leave the comparisons there.

First of all, my understanding is that Turbonomic is not a monitoring tool for virtualized environments:
while competitors mostly focus on alerts to warn you when something in your infrastructure goes south,
Turbonomic has a different approach that revolves around the health of your applications so that they
can always perform in their “desired state”, and therefore “serve their purpose”. To achieve this goal
Turbonomic uses the economic paradigm of the “supply chain” where any actor (a VM, a Storage
Array, a Webserver or a Virtual Datacenter) “buys” resources or “sells” them to other elements in the
chain. I admit that I am still not completely sold to this analogy, but – once again – I am looking forward
to hear more when I will meet them in person.
Using this approach, your infrastructure is analyzed in real-time so that the correct actions can be
performed at any moment of your application life cycle: the objective is to guarantee that applications
perform as expected and co-exist gracefully with other workloads. Turbonomic will act during the Plan,
Build and Run phases factoring in the changes in available capacity resulting from the planned
deployment of new workloads, suggesting the appropriate placement, scaling up or down your VMs
specs, instantiating new nodes etc. All of this can be done manually (following Turbonomic’s
recommendations) or in a totally automated way.
The interesting bit here is that when we refer to “the infrastructure” we are not limited to the classic
and ubiquitous VMware environment: Turbonomic supports all the major hypervisors and public cloud
services, all manageable from a single console and grouped into a single “Cloud Resource Pool” (I
totally made up this definition). Considering all of the above, actions triggered by Turbonomic can be
applied to any of the “cloud resource providers” you have available… Imagine that Turbonomic realizes
that you need to scale up your webfarm to handle extra traffic, it might actually suggest you to migrate
your webserver VMs from vSphere to Azure not only because in the public cloud you’d find the
resources you cannot anymore afford in your maxed-out private DC, but also because the performance
in the cloud would be better and the cost would be lower!
After all “Cross Cloud” is the new buzzword and Turbonomic seems to already be well positioned
there. So, now that I think I have more or less understood what Turbonomic does, what I am expecting
to learn at TFD14 is how Turbonomic does it, so I am hoping to be part of some deep-dive session. I
want to see those gears spinning!
Stay tuned for more Turbonomic feedback when I am back from Boston, and let’s move to the last of
the TFD14 Preview Series posts (coming soon) on Datrium.
This article is a follow up to my TFD14 Turbonomic preview; at that time I knew very little about
Turbonomic and that post was a collection of thoughts and impressions I gathered looking at the
product from a distance. I am happy to say that after the TFD presentation, my understanding of the
solution is clearer and the initial good impressions are confirmed.
Turbonomic is – in their own words – an “Autonomic Platform”; the play on words here is the merge
between Automation and Economy, that is because Turbonomic uses the “Supply Chain” metaphor,
where every element in the infrastructure “buys” resources from the underlying components and “sells”
upstream, leveraging at the same time automation to ensure that the apps are always performing in
their “Desired State”.
The objective is to “assure the applications performance” regardless of where the app is running (in
the Private, Public or Hybrid Cloud). Coming from an operations background I know well how difficult
it is to keep an infrastructure running within ideal parameters: any single intervention – no matter how
apparently insignificant – leads to an imbalance in the infrastructure and this, in turn, leads to a
deviation from those optimal parameters. What happens is that app performances are less predictable
and corrective actions must be taken to return to the “Desired State”. This is what is called the “Break-
Fix” loop, which requires continuous human intervention.

But what if we could have a solution capable of detecting in real-time the infrastructure changes
required to remain in a steady, desired state, recommending the correct actions and eventually
applying them automatically and without any human action in real-time? Turbonomic wants to be
exactly that solution and it does not limit itself to assure the well-being of the applications, but also
tries to find the right balance between performance, efficiency and compliance, parameters notoriously
at odds with each other. Now, the cool thing is that Turbonomic’s engine is designed to obtain metrics
from a wide (and growing) range of infrastructure components, while also interacting with any 3rd party
management tool like Service Management Systems, CMDBs, Orchestration Engines, Monitoring
Tools etc. This is achievable thanks to the adoption of a complete set of public APIs that allows for the
extension of the capabilities of the product beyond what comes out-of-the-box. This gives the customer
maximum flexibility and integration with their internal processes.

One of the biggest achievements showcased by Turbonomic at TFD14 is the new HTML5 UI, which
has completely been redesigned: not only the performance is way faster than that of the old Flash
Web UI, but the UI has been simplified so recommended actions are available at a glance, dependency
of components (the supply chain) is immediately understandable, past (and forecasted) metrics easily
obtainable.

The same new UI makes it also very simple to connect Turbonomic to different infrastructure
components, and it does so without any agents: the main Hypervisors, Storage Arrays, Application
Servers, Databases etc are already supported by Turbonomic and the list grows with any new release.
If one of your endpoints is not currently supported, Turbonomic can work with you to create the
connector or you can do it yourself using the well-documented APIs.
What-if scenarios are also supported, meaning that Turbonomic can forecast the impact of new
workloads added (or removed) from the infrastructure and suggest the matching required actions (such
as purchase new hardware or the release of unneeded resources).
Finally, with the current release Turbonomic allows to apply the same logic available for your private
clouds to public ones, all within the same browser window. It will allow you to resize or your Amazon
instances or move them across availability zones just as if it would recommend you to add RAM to
your vSphere VM or move it to another cluster. More public cloud related features are coming up with
the next release, so stay tuned. Containers are now also supported and I am sure we’ll see more of
this in the future, including integration with Kubernetes.
Be sure to check Turbonomic’s demo on the TFD website to see yourself the capabilities of the current
release and Eric and Mor go deep-dive.
Overall I was positively impressed by what Turbonomic showcased at TFD14; this is a company I will
keep in my watch list and so should you if you care about controlling and managing the performance
of your apps while maintaining your grasp on efficiency and compliance.