Likelihood to Recommend Cisco Intersight is very well suited for doing firmware upgrades across all of your cisco hardware. So far we have had no problems pushing out new firmware. It's also well suited for hardware management. Cisco TAC has the ability to pull logs for the IMC for themselves, which saves you from having to pull the logs yourself and then uploading them to the case. It may or may not be appropriate for upgrading operating systems. I have not been able to test it.
Read full review It has helped save us so much time, as it was designed to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that we were using other tools to perform and that required so much manual intervention. It does not work very well within Windows environments, understandably, but I would love to see more integration. I want it to be sexy and attractive to more than just geeky sysadmins.
Read full review Pros Ease of implementation of our UCS-X Platforms Ease of Management Cross visibility to our Data Center Infrastructure (Network, Storage, Compute) Ability to Automate our configurations Ability to create profiles for better consistency and standardization Read full review Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks. Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do. Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to. Read full review Cons Interface is quite slow Interface tree (navigating between server, profile, blade, chassis, FI, etc) is counterintuitive and needs more links in the tree Deploying minor changes takes much longer than in UCSM or UCSC Read full review YAML is hard for many to adopt. Moving to a system that is not as white space sensitive would likely increase uptake. AAP and EDA should be more closely aligned. There are differences that can trip users of the integration up. An example would be the way that variables are used. Event-driven Ansible output is not as informative as AAP. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We use it every single day and love the ease of it and the integration of all our servers
Read full review Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
Read full review Usability Usability of Cisco Intersight is highly dependent on the licensing purchased. The default (free) license level provides a lot of value for the minimal amount of effort to implement. The paid license levels provide additional features (detailed inventory, configuration management and deployment, etc.)
Read full review the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks
Read full review Performance Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
Read full review Support Rating Support for this platform is unmatched. I've used only a couple of other platforms, honestly, but Cisco Intersight's support system really works, and they do a great job. Any issue I've had was solved in a timely manner with a polite representative who cared about helping me and not just plainly reading off of a script that doesn't actually help. I rate it well.
Read full review There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
Read full review Implementation Rating I spoke on this topic today!
Read full review Alternatives Considered I personally think that Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service is at the top of its class when it comes to managing data center hardware. The cloud-connected design feels very modern and easy to use. The mobile app is something I wouldn't expect to get in a server management tool. The way it can update, monitor, and manage our servers is very nice. Overall, we are very happy with it.
Read full review I haven't thought of any right now other than just doing our own home-brewed shell scripts. Command line scripts. And how does this compare? It's light years ahead, especially with the ability to share credentials without giving the person the actual credentials. You can delegate that within, I guess what used to be called Ansible Tower, which is now the Ansible Automation platform. It lets you share, I can give you the keys without you being able to see the keys. It's great
Read full review Return on Investment It is positive for a few people being able to manage a lot of hardware It does put the management in the cloud, which some could argue is a security vulnerability. It is difficult to move hardware from Intersign managed to standalone. Read full review Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers automation and ML tools that allow me to automate complex IT tasks. Through automation analytics, it is seamless to gain full visibility into automation performance allowing me to make informed decisions. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows me to move rapidly from insights to action. Creating and sharing automation content in one place unify a team in one place hence enhancing real-time collaboration. Read full review ScreenShots