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.
"The solution appears to be stable and scalable."
"It has improve our organization through the remote management of non-domain joined devices."
"Intune is effective because of the configuration management and endpoint security it provides. The graphical interface makes it easier to configure and deploy devices."
"The synchronization of Intune with other Microsoft solutions is a valuable feature."
"I like that we can implement conditional access."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"The most valuable features are the ones that make sure that the deployment is of a standard operating system and the Zero Touch deployment, which is very useful. This allows users to have an out of box experience."
"The solution has reduced the risk of security breaches by 30%."
"I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"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."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"It's nice to have the Dashboard where people can see it, have it report to our ELK stack. It's far more convenient, and we can trigger it with API and schedules, which is better than doing it with a whole bunch of scripts."
"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."
"There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master)."
"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 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."
"The most valuable features are that it's multi-tenant and the ability for scale."
"The infrastructure has helped us to greatly increase our agility."
"vRA provides that single pane of glass for our cloud tenants to deploy, monitor, access, and manage their VMs/guest operating systems."
"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."
"Our customers don't have to manage HVAC and space and cooling and all of those things that they used to have to do. Today, all they have to do is provision a server and manage their users."
"The automation part is valuable, especially where vRA integrates with vRO, because it reduces the amount of effort we have to make."
"The most valuable feature is the way that it plugs into our monitoring systems, and Infoblox and Puppet."
"The scalability could be improved, and like most other MDM products, Intune is good but not 100% there yet."
"Having a dedicated configuration server that assists in modifying the configuration service, and creating personalized structures, interfaces, and web services could enhance usability."
"The Mac integration has room for improvement."
"Microsoft Intune lacks the ability to provide seamless remote assistance or remote control."
"The configuration and pricing can be improved."
"Intune has limited integration with non-Microsoft solutions."
"In future releases, I would like to see better integration with Apple products."
"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."
"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."
"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding."
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"The solution must be made easier to configure."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We had a lot of issues at first. Especially with doing any kind of upgrades, it was a complete tear-down and a complete rebuild of all the Blueprints. The upgrade process was not easy or intuitive at all. But it seems to be getting better."
"I would like to see better integration capabilities. Maybe if they could develop libraries within Aria Automation for simpler integration with other third-party solutions, instead of just basic integration."
"The solution is intuitive, but not necessarily user-friendly. In particular, it's the documentation. It's a lot of going-through-the-weeds types of scenarios. There is just an abundance of information, so it's a matter of understanding how the objects or the relationships exist, and then, obviously, being able to access that information and knowing how to make use of it."
"Multitenancy management is a little bit difficult to do, so it is an area that can be improved."
"The initial setup was not straightforward. It was not simple, and we had a PoC. We had VMware help us deploy it, and it took them an exorbitant amount of time."
"For the administrator, it can be a little challenging. For the administrator, there are a lot of moving parts. It is fine once you figure out where the knobs are you need to twiddle, but it can be a challenge to get it up and running."
"It's not cheap."
"It does go down from time to time. We have some issues with the appliances sometimes and we have to do reboots in the middle of the day. That affects the ability for them to deploy."
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 "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". 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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