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."There are so many models that I don't have to create one."
"The biggest thing I liked about Ansible is the check mode so that we can verify, after we've pushed, that the config there is actually what we intended."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"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."
"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 Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."
"It is agentless. I don't have to think about which client system my unit has understanding in or not, because I can execute from my system. It will go and configure it, and any module that it is looking for will be shipped out."
"It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything."
"From a security standpoint, the customer was able to better secure critical workloads while routing L2/L3 worked normally, giving them more confidence that they would be ready for any potential security incident mitigation or outage (DR)."
"I have found VMware NSX to be easy to use."
"The we can actually extend Layer 2 networking across datacenters, and also Layer 3 networking, which comes along with it."
"The best part is the blueprint creation where I can create their things and then move on to the target environment."
"It gives more security and micro-segmentation. It helps to set network configurations in an easy way."
"The solution is robust as it covers everything we want to do and is stable, so we're happy enough with it. We have had no problems so far. Everything is great."
"It's very important for them to have small footprints and have as much services in their servers, as possible."
"I have found the solution to be stable."
"The user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional."
"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."
"There are some options not available in the community edition of the solution."
"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."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"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."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"There could be an improvement in regards to security."
"Everybody needs a network to connect to, and VMware doesn't readily provide one."
"VMware NSX should be able to scale for different customers, even the big ones. Its scalability needs improvement. Stability for it should also be improved."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"We've have had good and bad experiences with them. We don't always find them to be so impactful. Sometimes the support guy isn't so on top of resolving the issue and it can take a while to sort out."
"We would like better integration with the standards on the market. For example, with OSPF, their integration in NSX is very low. It's not a full OSPF integration. It is too thin from a protocol perspective."
"The engineering team has room for improvement. They should have have more of a Knowledge Base about different case studies and should develop more advanced features. These kinds of improvements will change the way things get done."
"The training costs a minimum of $3,000, which is expensive and should be reduced."
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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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