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."On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions."
"Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"VMware NSX offers some of the best features for security, such as micro-segmentation."
"During our experience, the solution has been stable."
"VMware NSX is a very good solution. It's also a scalable solution."
"Their technical support is very good. They help us figure out solutions when we have problems."
"The most valuable features of VMware NSX are the tight integration with the VMware Hypervisor natively and the management console. We have a lot of other integrations where you are able to see the virtual machine's end-to-end visibility."
"The installation is straightforward, it took a couple of hours."
"Though I haven't been working a lot on VMware NSX, it's good to have. What I like the most about it is that its console is good, and it doesn't take a lot of effort in terms of doing my daily tasks on it or what it's meant for. VMware NSX is still a preferred product in the market."
"The microsegmentation is a good feature. You can segment details, products, or hardware information."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"There are some options not available in the community edition of the solution."
"I have seen indications that the documentation needs improvement. They are providing a "How to Improve Your Documentation" presentation at this conference."
"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."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"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."
"Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules."
"We had some complexities implementing into the other parts of a network."
"I would like them to make integration with other vendors easier."
"The next release of NSX should try to make Kubernetes and container integration a little easier than it is now. It's quite a complicated process."
"The integration with other brands is not the best."
"I would like to have automating reporting built into common service management platforms, such as JIRA, Serviceaide, and ServiceNow."
"The technical support could use some improvement."
"The solution can improve by making it more straightforward, easier to install and maintain in the environment."
"It takes time to do the initial setup. It is a bit slow, which is surprising."
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 2nd in Network Automation with 58 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 4th in Network Automation with 93 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 "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". 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, Cisco ACI, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Cisco Secure Workload. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. VMware NSX report.
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