Cisco Intersight vs Ansible

• Intersight can consolidate Infra management on a single dashboard such as UCS Server, Hyperflex, Fabric Interconnect, UCSM.
• Device policy and configuration can be deployed from Intersight.
• Firmware and software upgrade for all devices can be done from Intersight.
• No impact to DC production if Intersight connection is interrupted.
• Apps workload data is not passed through Intersight, only the control plane.
• TAC can be opened via Intersight.

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• Agentless. For our implementation, this is the single biggest factor. If we have to touch the machine and install an agent before we can start managing it, that's already too much effort and slows us down.
• Re-entrant. This is not unique to Ansible, but certainly a huge improvement over custom scripts and such. Because it's such a huge effort to make scripts re-entrant, most of our scripts did not allow an elegant way to recover on failure. Manually cleaning up the half-attempt and re-trying is still too cumbersome, and being able to just re-run Ansible is a great improvement!
• Infrastructure as code. This is new to Ansible, and there are still a few minor bugs with their AWS modules, but it's been a huge help being able to define our infrastructure in an Ansible playbook, commit it to source control, and use one tool for all our DevOps tasks.

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• The cost is a little high per trackable asset
• Mobile application is missing some features
• Automatic TAC case creation doesn't always work as advertised

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• Ansible Tower is a paid service, which can be annoying at times. But that is understandable, as it requires an additional level of support from the Ansible team to develop.
• There is a decently large learning curve for someone not familiar with setting up Unix environments. However, there is a very large support community with tons of documentation, so it's not a dealbreaker.

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• As a Cisco partner and vendor, it allows us to monitor and give proactive support to our customers in a way that was impossible before.
• Also gives proactive and predictive support from cisco since it allows for automatic case creation with cisco in case that a problem is detected in the infrastructure.

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• We have been able to deploy solutions to client issues without impacting uptime.
• Most system administration tasks have been automated so I am now free to work on architectural improvements or customer support.
• Our customer support has improved thanks to Ansible as it has allowed me more time away from repetitive system activities so I may assist with customer questions and application testing.

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