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.
"Mobile device management is most valuable."
"The biggest benefits of Intune are the ability to push changes and the added security. When we moved forward with Defender, we onboarded all those machines automatically. That helps dramatically. For a while, we were left with machines that weren't protected. We could see where people had done things they shouldn't have done, and Defender saved our skins a few times. It didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough that it made us glad we made that decision."
"Maturity makes it a stable product."
"The ability to push applications on devices is valuable. You do not have to manually install applications one by one. If you like to use ten different applications, you do not have to manually go and download them one by one. Intune can compile a package for you, and then you can just push them from the admin center."
"It's easy to manage."
"The solution is easy to use and it has good performance."
"I like that it's very good and very simple. I found that we just needed to have a proper subscription for an Intune tenant, and from the subscription, if we have the right role assigned, like the global admin role or the owner role, we can use Microsoft cloud resources. With the help of that, we can do many things like setting up Microsoft Intune in the cloud to create our virtual machines. All these can be done, and the steps are very simple. I really liked it. I like features like Windows Auto-Enrollment. I like it very much because whenever you supply it to the end-user, it will be ready to use immediately. The end-user only needs to provide the user credentials, and then they are good to go. I also really like Cloud PC, which was recently launched on Azure."
"The product has eased the deployment of Microsoft apps to the devices. We can manage it properly. We can control it and push the updates. Another company helped us with the deployment. However, we can do it internally."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"Its checking and validating ensures our packages are properly patched."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes."
"One of the most valuable features is lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center."
"It has saved us a lot of time and work. It helped us to reorganize some of our service lines, so we could be more efficient. For example, on our open system server team, we had 15 people building servers, now we have two."
"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"Our speed of provisioning has improved. We used to build systems manually, which would take four hours or a day. Nowadays we're able to spin something up off a template... and it takes about 20 minutes."
"Instead of deploying a VM from a template and going through the process of configuring that VM, with vRA we're able to click once and it does everything: grabs an IP, joins it to the domain, loads whatever configuration agents are needed. It does all of that without manual intervention."
"The repetitive tasks which took provisioning storage, network, and compute two to three weeks, now takes five minutes."
"Even with the virtualization, it would take us at least three or four days to create a VM. With vRA we have brought that down to seven minutes. The solution has helped increase infrastructure, agility, speed of provisioning, time to market, application agility. Everything got super fast."
"A lot of its DevOps for infrastructure capabilities improve reliability. Much effort was put in by some customers, like a large automobile manufacturer, a large telecom, and two large banks, to achieve a certain level of capabilities in this space. These DevOps for infrastructure capabilities have saved time for developers. In one use case for a large marketplace, a typical release cycle took about 80 hours and was brought down to three hours by automating deployment for developers. The quicker that deployments happen, the faster that they can do their product release cycles."
"The initial setup is a little bit complex."
"The synchronization could be improved."
"For an existing customer who has an SCCM, it would need to be upgraded to an MECM first before I can introduce Microsoft Intune."
"I know that their AI pieces are at the infancy stage, but allowing users to do more tagging for information would be an interesting thing because Intune also directly integrates with Azure. Because a lot of the devices are hosted with that, you also get a lot of tagging of user data and other things like that."
"We only have major classifications for iOS and Android, but there are different brands that have different cycles of updates. If they can fine-tune it to make it more brand-specific, that would be even better."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"Lacking in features such as Wi-Fi and network security."
"The reports aren't complete, and it's not easy to build custom reports. For example, Windows Autopilot isn't working well in cases where the computers don't have a good internet connection. Then the option is not good enough."
"One problem that I'm facing right now is the mismatch between the new version of Python and Ansible. Sometimes it's Python 2, and sometimes it's Python 3. When things get a bit dicey, I wish that Ansible would solve this issue by itself. I don't want to have to specify if it is Python 3 or version 2."
"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."
"Accessibility. Ansible uses a CLI by default. Those accustomed to it can find their way and adopt the YAML files easily over time. But, some users are more comfortable using UIs..."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"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 would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"The upgrade experience is horrible. It's not straightforward, there are a lot of failures, a lot of support interactions. It's not something that we are able to pull off ourselves. I've been with vRA since it was termed vCSA. We've gone through multiple rounds, and it has never been easy."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"It is not super-intuitive. It does require some skills to understand how to use it. I had no problem, but I had spent a lot of time already learning this product ahead of moving it to an operational status. But as we did so, we had a hard time bringing some people from other groups into the fold, to script and work against this environment. So, the ability to build workflows within that automation needs to be streamlined."
"My impression of its stability is "middle of the road." We've had some issues where it seems to be a little bit sensitive, where deployments fail and we don't really know a specific reason why. We'll dig through logs and try and figure out what's going on, but it's not always apparent as to why it failed. And you can kick it off again and it'll succeed. So stability could be better."
"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."
"The connectivity between VMs is easy, but they can be made more effective if we have a single proof point where we can configure all the biggest data at a single point."
"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."
"I would like to see a simpler way of provisioning it. As is, we can automate the provisioning of a VM, however, when it comes to the external IPs, that is outside of VMware. But that has to be automated as well. If there was a way for us to have the virtual machines connect to switches that are external to VMware, that would be great. That way, it would handle the entire workflow from creation and provisioning of a VM to the connectivity to the external IP addresses which allow our customers to have access to the VM. Currently, that IP configuration has to be done manually."
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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