We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and VMware Vrealize Automation VRA based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: When compared, the two solutions receive similar ratings for each of the categories listed above. They differ mostly in terms of the features they provide.
"Conditional access helps me control uncontrolled access."
"The features I found most valuable in Intune are its user visibility and troubleshooting options."
"The dashboards, the security, and the customization capabilities work very well for us."
"Maturity makes it a stable product."
"I like the tool's integration with Apple. Anyone who creates an ID in Intune will get an Apple ID."
"The solution is easy to use, simple to understand for those new to using it, and combined with the other Microsoft products it makes for an overall good package."
"The solution appears to be stable and scalable."
"It is a very stable and scalable cloud-only solution."
"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."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"It's nice to have the Dashboard where people can see it, have it report to our ELK stack. It's far more convenient, and we can trigger it with API and schedules, which is better than doing it with a whole bunch of scripts."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"I like the inventory management. It's a very nice, simple, concise way to keep all that data together. And the API allows us to use it even for things that are not Ansible."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform are the agentless platform and writing the code is simple using the Yaml computer language."
"It was easy to read and learn. It is a YAML-based syntax, which makes it easily understand and pick up."
"We have also found it to be intuitive and user-friendly. It's something that, because it has the workflows that are very easily graphed out - you can follow what it's doing, it's very picturesque, you can see what it's doing easily - it's something that you can hand over to a user who is not familiar with it and they can wrap their brain around it pretty quickly."
"Aria Automation gives you the flexibility to deploy tenants with customized blueprints for permissions and policies. Version 7.8 consisted of multiple products, so you had to deploy a lot of virtual machines on one of the servers. Starting from 8.6, VMware consolidated all the components into one Linux appliance. This allows the option to use vRA or DevOps capabilities."
"Among the valuable features are the ease and speed of creating the VMs. Originally, we provisioned them manually and it would take us two days to do the provisioning... but with the automation, we are able to provision a VM with the click of a button, within seconds. It cut down on the time as well as cut down on the expense and employee cost in provisioning."
"vRA helps automate deployment for developers. We do a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment so it will suit each of our customers. So, we have different business units who have their own templates."
"The product is very user-friendly."
"The solution is user-friendly and intuitive."
"The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products."
"The IT support for developers is nice as well because they are able to manage the environment themselves."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."
"The feature that allows us to import the business application from the configuration manager to Intune is not very good at this time."
"The pricing can be expensive if you are not combining it with other products."
"They can improve their MAM policies a little bit more and make them more granular. They should include more granular group policies. They are there, but they need to be more granular. Its stability should also be improved. It is not very stable. Sometimes, it shows some inconsistencies across tenants."
"It would be helpful if there was proactive remediation."
"Intune's areas for improvement revolve around security and certificate management."
"In the past, I raised some tickets for the enhancement feature, which was missing in Intune."
"The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"Improvements should be made in terms of execution speed, which is, I believe, the most lacking feature. Aside from that, re-triggering a failed task is another useful feature."
"We would like support for the post-integration of this product before cloud frameworks because right now their approach is to avoid using on-premises activities and move everything to the cloud."
"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."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"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."
"On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results."
"The initial setup was complex from beginning to delivery. The current version is a bit more complex than version 7 to deploy."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
"The most important thing that we missed in vRanger was the possibility to mount several images instantaneously and present it so we can run it immediately."
"It needs to be more dynamic with variable customization to make new workloads more reliable. It also needs to be faster. We are exploring vRA version 8 right now and maybe what I'm requesting is available in the new version, but we haven't yet explored it fully."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"The back-end has a steep learning curve."
"It's not a smooth upgrade process. For a DTA environment, which is very simple, it is a smooth process, but for our production environment, which is quite enhanced and has a lot of dependencies, it's not easy at all, and it results in a lot of errors... It takes a lot of retries to upgrade which ends up being costly."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 62 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while VMware Aria Automation 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 Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BMC TrueSight Server Automation and BigFix, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus, vCenter Orchestrator and Red Hat OpenShift.
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