Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware NSX comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Network Automation
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Configuration Management (1st)
VMware NSX
Ranking in Network Automation
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Network Virtualization (2nd), Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Microsegmentation Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2024, in the Network Automation category, the mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 16.9%, up from 15.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware NSX is 7.4%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Automation
Unique Categories:
Release Automation
4.8%
Configuration Management
15.5%
Network Virtualization
50.0%
Cloud and Data Center Security
17.4%
 

Featured Reviews

RM
May 8, 2024
Makes automation easy and helps with standardization
There should be consistency. I know that it is always changing, but when we are trying to get some users to do something in basic Ansible that they are not really interested in doing but their job requires them to do it, they start finding inconsistencies. A good example of that is that we have people who are trying to automate things with Windows and Active Directory. There is a community version of the Windows collection that deals with Active Directory. You can use a lot of that code as it is described. It works with the certified Microsoft Active Directory collection if you take the same information because there are the same parameters and values, and the only thing that changes is the collection name. If you switch that out, it does not work, so having a new person run into a problem that even a seasoned person cannot understand does not work. It turns them off. You want them to have success early on. Sometimes in Ansible, you run into some inconsistencies that you do not understand and then you are concerned because it says, "We are going to deprecate this." You are like, "How long do I have to keep using this thing that is going to be deprecated before I have to move on to this other thing?" That just does not seem to work.
AANKITGUPTAA - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 14, 2022
Great micro-segmentation, distributed IPS, and IDS functionality
I primarily use the product as network virtualization software. VMware NSX is a great product for network virtualization. No other vendor can offer this kind of solution up until now, and it's great for enhancing security at the virtual machine level. There is micro-segmentation, and a distributed…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"RBAC is great around Organizations and I can use that backend as our lab. Ingesting stuff into the JSON logs, into any sort of logging collector; it works with Splunk and there are other collectors as well. It supports Sumo and that helps, I can go create reports in Sumo Logic. Workflows are an interesting feature. I can collect a lot of templates and create a workflow out of them."
"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 initial setup is straightforward."
"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."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps providing predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production."
"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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the tool's protection."
"This solution comes with an API that can easily integrate with other solutions."
"The micro-segmentation and the ability to create policy rules are valuable."
"The microsegmentation allows me to sleep at night. My job is reducing risk, plugging security holes, and working with the automated layer security. Even if somebody spins up a new server, it has to have a tag in NSX."
"The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the ability to set up virtual networking environments."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"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."
"The solution must be made easier to configure."
"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."
"The SSM connection access needs improvement"
"They could do more with cloud management."
"There is room for improvement in VMware NSX's workload management, particularly in the orchestration layer and in managing workloads across multiple clouds."
"Just being more knowledgeable about the different functions."
"It might be nice to have more AI in the future."
"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."
"Quite a complex solution."
"There are always issues integrating with Cisco."
"I would like to see automation capabilities in the deployment process."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a little pricey but it is affordable. It is not that bad."
"The pricing is okay."
"Ansible Tower is pretty expensive."
"Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
"Users have to pay a per-node cost of around $ 100 per node."
"You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
"The pricing for us is huge because we use twenty thousand nodes, so that is a huge infrastructure, but if someone is using a small infrastructure, then the pricing is not so much."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an affordable solution."
"The price is significantly high and it can be a hurdle for many potential users."
"The licensing is renewed every three years. The cost for implementation and renovation are a huge portion of that price."
"Our customers have definitely complained about its cost. It's expensive. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of pricing where ten represents a high price. There are other products out there that are equally expensive."
"The solution is very expensive."
"The cost of the solution is a bit high."
"All the institutions have to pay monthly for the services in the cloud. They have to pay $30,000 every month for this service every three years."
"The solution is free and the price for the support can be expensive."
"We haven't had to hire a dedicated network engineer because NSX handles 90 percent of it. The reduced overhead in terms of managing networks has been the biggest plus."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Automation solutions are best for your needs.
787,779 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
26%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management have been outstanding. If you have a large environment, patching systems is much ...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that the set up will take depends on the kind of technical architecture that your org...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server wh...
What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?
Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch...
What do you like most about VMware NSX?
The product has valuable features for security and network extension.
 

Also Known As

Ansible
VMware Nicira
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
City of Avondale, Lumeta, Kroll Ontrack, Heartland Payment Systems, Baystate Heallth, Exostar, Tribune Media, iGATE, NTT Communications, Synergent, California Natural Resources Agency, Bloomington Public Schools, Columbia Sportswear, Join Experience S.A, Schuberg Philis
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. VMware NSX and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
787,779 professionals have used our research since 2012.