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.
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"I like the tool's integration with Apple. Anyone who creates an ID in Intune will get an Apple ID."
"We already use a lot of Microsoft products in our company, and therefore, it made sense to also use this product."
"We can manage and standardize security across your environment, identify problems, receive alerts, and so on. That's its purpose, and that's also why it's so good."
"For Windows services, there are multiple options within Intune to modernize it to be more internet-facing and dynamic."
"One of the main features of the solution is it allows the management of many devices in different ways."
"Based on my experience, I find Intune very flexible for managing Windows devices. We can use scripting, and we can make use of the self-service portal or the company portal to publish some of the applications for Windows."
"A great solution for anyone wanting a modern endpoint device management solution."
"The initial setup is easy and takes a few hours to complete."
"The reason I like Ansible is, first, the coding of it is very straightforward, it's very human-readable. I'm also on a contract, and I can clearly iterate and bring people up to speed very quickly on writing a Playbook compared with writing up a Puppet manifest or a Salt script."
"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"Having the Dashboard from an admin point of view, and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out, is helpful."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"We can automate a few host configurations using the product."
"The self service portal: People don't have to come to us to request something. They can just go fill out a form. Within 30 minutes, they have what they requested."
"To manage when VM's aren't being used, we have it set up so that it will auto-destroy them after a certain amount of time, obviously with permission from the user who owns it."
"The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins."
"The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable."
"The solution has helped us to increase infrastructure agility, mostly because, in addition to it being able to do its thing on its own, it has tie-ins to other parts of our CICD pipeline. We use Jenkins for our build process which, of course, vRA has plugins for, to be able to integrate with it. We use Chef and there is the Chef build as part of our image that we standardized to deploy, and that can tie in with our section of the pipeline that it does for applications."
"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."
"vRealize automation stability is pretty good. They are always fixing bugs. The product team is doing a great job of addressing any issues that we might have."
"I used the technical support during upgrades. They came onsite and are very technical. They are very good"
"I expect Microsoft Intune to have more features in the cloud because there are two major functionalities that we need to be added. This is software metering and license management. These functionalities, for now, must be on-premise. For this purpose, we have set up a SQL Server and I hope that in near future this option will be in the cloud in Microsoft Intune."
"The difficulty of the the roll out is surprisingly difficult considering this product is supposed to be an integrated part of the 365 suite."
"It doesn't economize when you scale up. We have over 14,000 employees, and we have between 7,500 and 8,000 city-owned or personal devices being used to conduct city business. Its price can be improved. It is not a cheap solution."
"There is room for improvement, particularly in terms of compatibility, extending beyond the well-known major brands."
"Technical support is not that great."
"There could be more wizard-driven policy development or creation. Some of the policies can get quite complex. If they have a wizard that assists the administrators in creating the policy, that will be a great job."
"One big problem with Microsoft is that they're changing the names of the products quite often, or they're quite consistently doing so. Intune is now Endpoint administration. Constantly switching the user interface or the administrative interface makes it quite hard to keep pace. If you are on a two-week holiday and you come back and look at the same screen you have looked at for the last couple of months, it looks different, which is annoying. Changing things around all the time doesn't make it easy."
"I would like the ability to install the agent on devices from suppliers, which would enable us to implement a zero-trust strategy for guest devices."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"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."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
"The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"It is too broad scale and complicated. It takes too many clicks to do things."
"In terms of additional features, I would like it to be able to poll my vCenter infrastructure more rapidly and adapt to changes quickly. It should alert me and let me know when there are broken components, as a result of underlying infrastructure changes. It needs to be more stringent."
"We upgraded twice. The last upgrade was a bit problematic."
"It would be better if VMware would provide API documentation for developers and customers on the Internet."
"There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it. However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial."
"The stability is why I rated it a seven and not higher. There were several cases where we had to restart some services because it wasn't working correctly anymore. People cannot extend their machine or replay their machine. There is no alert to say that there is a problem and that we should stop the service. The monitoring system is not very good."
"It is not intuitive or user-friendly. It's complicated as heck. We actually hired VMware Professional Services to come in. I understand the newer version, which we're not quite on yet, is easier and that the interface is better. But the product is really a profession unto itself. The user interface could be improved on."
"They could extend the ability to use vRealize Orchestrator Automation for organizations with multiple tenants. It should be easier to operate and extend different capabilities from vRealize Orchestrator. Currently, it's difficult to build advanced services in Aria Automation because you need to use the vRealize Orchestrator."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 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 "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". 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 SaltStack.
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