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 stability of Microsoft Intune is 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."
"It's easy to manage and easy to configure."
"As the solution is a software as a service, the scalability is unlimited."
"Mobile device management is most valuable."
"The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult."
"We have one MDM that works with Windows, iOS, and Android."
"For Windows services, there are multiple options within Intune to modernize it to be more internet-facing and dynamic."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"The automation manager is very good."
"It enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."
"The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature."
"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 initial setup is easy and takes a few hours to complete."
"It provides visibility into the VM space."
"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"It is probably 90 percent quicker to get something out the door than it was before. For developers, depending on who is building VMs for them, sometimes they request anywhere from 20 to 100. Now, we can deploy them in a matter of an hour, where previously it might have taken me three days to deploy out 100 VMs."
"The whole VMR ecosystem allows us to serve multiple customers, multiple organizations and also multiple units per customer. We can cover every level without using the whole VRA and the rest of the ecosystem. We don't need to use a separate product to provide separate functionalities for the customer. We can cover all the use cases using only one product on our side which is really helpful. T"
"It is possible to completely automatize the creation and removal of a virtual machine."
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"The operations manager does a fantastic job on the front end because it includes on-premises and cloud use cases."
"The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins."
"Reporting in Microsoft solutions is pathetic. With Intune, I'm getting a free inventory tool, but I don't get a reporting tool. When I go to Intune, I can see one machine's entire data in terms of the hardware and the software running on it, but I cannot generate a report for all the machines in the organization. The reporting is the only feature holding back the functionality that is already there."
"Integrating certain group policies can be challenging and may necessitate using on-premises systems to integrate them with Microsoft Intune."
"The solution could improve its flexibility."
"I have a lot of Apple products in my environment. It would be nice to have an improved integration of Apple products with Microsoft Intune without Jam."
"The reporting and cost have room for improvement."
"The configuration could be better by consolidating options and making it simpler."
"It should be easier to define policies and comply with those policies."
"It needs incorporation of Knox, ZeroTouch, etc."
"Ansible could use more public relations and marketing."
"The solution must be made easier to configure."
"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."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"It needs better documentation."
"I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."
"The setup needs coding. It's not easy. It's not straightforward."
"The initial setup is complex. There are too many components to integrate, especially when we integrated with different storage types and backup vendors. All the integration made it more complex."
"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."
"Upgrades are always a pain."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
"When you start to do a deployment where you need higher availability and more resiliency, then the complexity goes up drastically."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
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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