Turbonomic: monitor and manage infrastructures in real-time

Formerly known as VMturbo, Turbonomic is a platform that provides valuable information and details on Applications, Infrastructures and Clouds. All in real-time. As soon as the necessary details are collected the Turbonomic platform also provides actionable recommendations that once executed either manually or automatically bring the infrastructure in what should be desired state.

Essentially rather than playing that sort of “catching 22” situation where resources are wasted or have not been reclaimed yet, Turbonomic acts proactively measuring, collecting and automating the infrastructure in order to keep the systems that are monitored in a desired state. The list of supported environments, platforms and technologies is impressive. At the time of writing with Turbonomic Operations Manager 5.5.7 release the following targets are supported.

Hypervisors:

•  vCenter
• RHEV-M
• Hyper-V
• XenServer
• IBM PowerVM

Cloud Management

• vCloud Director
• CloudStack
• OpenStack
• VMM
• AWS
• Azure
• SoftLayer

Load Balancer

• NetScaler

Storage

• Nutanix
• NetApp
• EMC VNX / XtremIO / VMAX
• Dell Compellent
• HP 3PAR

The list is impressive and goes on with Enterprise Applications. But it gets even better! Turbonomic provides a fully functional evaluation trial for 30 days after which the Monitoring part is free and unlimited forever. So at this point  it’s time to get our hands dirty in our home lab and deploy the evaluation version shipping in most common formats. For this article I will use the popular VMware OVF package as per screenshots below.

Let’s start browsing to the downloaded OVF package.

Before moving to the next step let’s accept the extra configuration required for this Virtual Appliance. With this setting we are disabling the Memory Ballooning feature just for this VM. More information can be found here. This will allow Turbonomic virtual appliance to not compete with memory resources when the host tries to reclaim the memory back.

Let’s accept the License Agreement.

As per usual let’s provide a name for the virtual appliance and select the location in infrastructure where the appliance will be located.

At this point we can select a suitable location where to deploy our appliance. As per previous screenshot the size is approximately 150 GB when “Thick Provisioned”.

Let’s select the desired virtual network. The IP network details will be provided later on by mean of the IPsetup utility after first deployment.

And as per usual a final summary before committing the settings. Also I would recommend to review the Hardware Settings required before the Power On. For example aligning the vCPUs with the physical ones on the Host will reduce the overhead consuming less resources.

At this point we can use the following:

• User: root
• Password: vmturbo

After the first login let’s run the command:

ipsetup

and follow the information on the screen providing the required details. I would recommend to have created the necessary DNS (A) records for the Turbonomic Operations Manager appliance making sure the FQDN name resolution works both ways

In my case I’m not using a proxy so I can skip this step.

And a confirmation of the settings is now visible.

Let’s point the browser to the configured IP address. In case of firewalls, ports 80 and 443 should be open. Default User Name is “Administrator” and Password “vmturbo”.

It’s now time to update the default password.

We are ready for first time configurations.

As per screenshot below.

Let’s paste the content of the text file sent during the registration to Turbonomic website.

And from here it is possible to view the licensed products.

It’s now time to add the targets we would like to monitor. So” Add”.

Let’s specify the hypervisor.

and in my case would be a VMware Hypervisor so vCenter is my option to “talk” with the Hosts. It is possible to add multiple targets with pertinent credentials in one go.

As per screenshot below let’s review and click on next.

Finally it possible to specify the details for the mail sserver in order to receive configurable notifications.

At this point Turbonomic will start scanning and collecting the information about our targets. Based on these will also provide the recommendations. All these aspects can eb easily configured from the GUI which is conveniently organised in different tabs with different views. All these views are highly configurable showing information and statistics for both virtual and physical objects. A quick example the screenshot below.