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."Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"The automation manager is very good."
"The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"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."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"This solution comes with an API that can easily integrate with other solutions."
"The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the high bandwidth."
"The most valuable features are the micro-segmentation and integrated security options."
"Overall, I would say the solution has been quite stable."
"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."
"The initial setup was straightforward. You just have to click it and follow the manuals."
"Though I haven't been working a lot on VMware NSX, it's good to have. What I like the most about it is that its console is good, and it doesn't take a lot of effort in terms of doing my daily tasks on it or what it's meant for. VMware NSX is still a preferred product in the market."
"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."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"The governance features could be improved."
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is slightly expensive, and its pricing could be improved."
"They could do more with cloud management."
"The solution is quite complex. You need to keep your thinking cap on and know what you are doing: Go to the training and listen to the solution architects when they come in because they have a lot of knowledge."
"Despite being somewhat behind in the cybersecurity field, VMware should develop a cloud and a red team to continuously monitor for new malware and ransomware."
"If you're worried that NSX is too complex, I would tell you to take another look. If you compare NSX to a similar solution you might find it to be a bit more complex. Usually, the guy that comes in to implement NSX isn't the network guy and will lack the knowledge for the program. He can lack the knowledge for this program and will therefore think it's complex. You need somebody with network experience."
"The integration with other brands is not the best."
"Just being more knowledgeable about the different functions."
"The feature it can improve is essentially application-based load balancing with intelligent load distribution for applications that require redundancy and high availability."
"Quite a complex solution."
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 2nd in Network Automation with 62 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 4th in Network Automation with 94 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 "Makes it easy to build playbooks and saves time and resources". 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, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco ACI and HPE SDN. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. VMware NSX report.
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