We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and VMware NSX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Automation solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master)."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"Ansible Galaxy is helpful for roles and Git Submodules: No dependency in managing playbooks. Also, fact caching in redis for host/role grp information speeds up execution. Finally, variable management is easy."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"The solution can scale."
"Any administrator with basic networking knowledge, in a couple of days, can be in full control of their networking without going through a networking engineer."
"Overall, I would say the solution has been quite stable."
"The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the ease of use and its user friendly. For example, it is simple to change the subnet masks."
"The solution is very stable and reliable."
"I have found VMware NSX to be easy to use."
"The microsegmentation is a good feature. You can segment details, products, or hardware information."
"VMware NSX is a very good solution. It's also a scalable solution."
"The dashboard is comprehensive and easy to use."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"There are some options not available in the community edition of the solution."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"The support needs improvement."
"VMware NSX only supports some platforms like KVM."
"Everybody needs a network to connect to, and VMware doesn't readily provide one."
"The technical support could use some improvement."
"It could be more user-friendly, but it's manageable. When we add a specific node to this particular NSX and the configuration changes, it won't push through the errors where required, but it'll accept it. However, while using it, we will have issues. It can also be more stable."
"The integration with other brands is not the best."
"The scalability is not perfect."
"Some configuration maximums are limiting to the user, especially when it comes to the deployment of very, very large environments."
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 2nd in Network Automation with 62 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 4th in Network Automation with 94 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while VMware NSX is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Makes it easy to build playbooks and saves time and resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware NSX writes "Allows for seamless micro-segmentation and the support is exceptional". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Microsoft Intune, whereas VMware NSX is most compared with Nutanix Flow Network Security, Illumio, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco ACI and HPE SDN. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. VMware NSX report.
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