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."It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"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 has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"Its checking and validating ensures our packages are properly patched."
"We like that everything is integrated."
"To be able to do the DR and SRM migrations from datacenter to datacenter, we're able to do them with SRM with VXLAN, with the NSX product."
"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."
"NSX is good in managing security or controlling the security and the access control for each single VM."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to create, develop, and deploy servers in minutes to hours, rather than days."
"I am impressed with the tool's protection."
"Any administrator with basic networking knowledge, in a couple of days, can be in full control of their networking without going through a networking engineer."
"NSX has excellent security features like virtual firewalls. I also like the micro-segmentation features, which are useful for the virtual machines inside the servers."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"It would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well."
"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."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"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."
"It needs better documentation."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
"Since most people are very much used to physical networking, they find it difficult to use VMware NSX in the initial stage."
"Quite a complex solution."
"The price could be better. The non-enterprise version of the product should also be improved. I would like VMware to expand beyond the network and provide some VLAN technologies and more. I think we have one, but it's more on the distribution side because it's more on the upper side of the network. I'm looking forward to that."
"We would to have a reverse proxy. This would add great value to the solution."
"Going through and getting more features sets from the routing protocols is definitely necessary for the future."
"It could be more user-friendly, but it's manageable. When we add a specific node to this particular NSX and the configuration changes, it won't push through the errors where required, but it'll accept it. However, while using it, we will have issues. It can also be more stable."
"It lacks full knowledge of physical side of the network topology."
"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."
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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 and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. VMware NSX report.
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