Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Easy configuration and setup. Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy. Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review It’s unfortunate, but more and more, the quality of VMware’s products and the technical support teams behind them has degraded significantly. We have opened several support requests within the last few months and ended up resolving a large majority ourselves due to the poor performance of their remote teams. VMware is suffering from the same illness that’s affecting multiple U.S. technology firms, in that their focus has shifted completely away from their customers and moved to pleasing investors. In doing so, clients suffer because they do not get properly tested products and the support teams behind them are very weak and overwhelmed. We worked close to a month trying to get SRM V6.5 to work. We have worked with many previous versions of SRM in the past while using HP EVAs, NetApps and Hitachi arrays, and we can honestly say that we are greatly disappointed with this release and the company. We escalated right up to engineering, but their response times were brutally slow; the technicians were juniors at best. As a technology leader, the last thing you want during a DR is to be dealing with a company that just can't deliver. SRM is not cheap, and you would expect much better products and support from VMware. If you are comparing products, try other companies like Veeam... We ended up using them instead, the setup and execution was easy and seamless, and they answered all our questions quickly and efficiently. They actually do care about their clients. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are deploying Ansible at all levels of the organization
Read full review - easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster
Read full review Usability the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks
Read full review VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.
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 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 Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.
Read full review Implementation Rating I spoke on this topic today!
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Entertained Veeam, however with SRM's tight integration and "brand" it was an easy decision. The cost for a 25 server license also weighed in the decision for using a VMware product. Plus I am a VMware fan and feel this option to go with SRM will transcend jobs.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster. We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM. Read full review ScreenShots