Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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.

Incentivized

The thing I mentioned earlier where we're constantly dealing with federal regulations or new agents that they want us to install and deploy and just getting those out in a consistent manner in a canned installation via Playbook is ideal

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Makes it easy to create and share automation in one central hub.
• Ansible content collections give me the ability to reuse code, making it rapid to carry out complex IT processes.
• Event-driven automation allows me to reduce manual tasks: it is rapid to know which action to take and respond automatically by receiving events from external apps automatically.

• 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

Incentivized

• Workflows should have more flexible paths than just success or failure.
• The upgrade process can be challenging with differences in security and environment.
• There is an opportunity to add CICD functionality into the tool.
• For development, it would be nice to have the option of editing a repo directly from AAP to allow quick tests/reruns. Then, allow it to push the updates back or create a new branch/PR in GitHub.
• The RBAC is good but could use improvements. One example would be an option that allows admins to assume the access of another user to validate it works as expected.

Incentivized

We use it every single day and love the ease of it and the integration of all our servers

We are deploying Ansible at all levels of the organization

Incentivized

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.)

Incentivized

the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I spoke on this topic today!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

AAP doesn't truly stack up against any of the products mentioned except for Aria Automation. But, it is extensible and open and has a lower cost to entry.

Incentivized

• 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.

• 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.