Ansible vs VMware Cloud Director Formerly vCloud Director

• 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 advantage to using vCloud Director is it a cloud based application allowing access anywhere. I have the ability to make changes to our virtual environment without being in the office or using a vpn.
• The vCloud Director provides a lot of the same features as vSphere.

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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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• It is not good for end users or customers to use. The UI is geared more towards VMware admins.
• There is somewhat of a learning curve to it, you have to think through and plan out how you want to set your OVDC and PVDCs up. It takes a lot of architecture experience.
• Once you built workloads in vCloud director, it's real difficult to take them out or manage them directly in vSphere. This is a huge pain.

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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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• Time to market = 0 means profits almost immediate after investment
• Customers trust the VMware brand more than any other
• Elasticity: allowing the company to choose the best HW in the lower layer

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