Salt Project vs. vRealize Suite & vCloud Suite (discontinued)

SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.

Incentivized

It is most suited where there multi cloud platform as VCloud suite provides most 2 important licences i.e. Vsphere 9India's leading hypervisor) and Vrealize Suite which helps to automate and also simplies IT management by making the solution most agile, efficient and easy to use. If there is a simple environment with just few servers where there is need for only 2-3 VMs, i will not recommend this.

Incentivized

• Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
• Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
• Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.

Incentivized

• One management platform for all the VMs across datacenters
• Automation of IT management
• Makes IT or Cloud management more agile and efficient.

Incentivized

• Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
• SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
• SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started

Incentivized

• There is nothing exactly like cons but one must should check all the features, it can be confusing at the times.
• It can be expensive as compared to some other products available in the market.
• Implementation can be little tricky, should done by Vmware engineer

Incentivized

We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.

We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.

Incentivized

VCloud mostly provides cloud management platform, all others also provide the same plus some other features so, Vcloud can be little less expensive in comparison to other solutions available in market. Also, it's very easy to use and deploy and manage your cloud platform. It is widely used by mid scale as well as large scale companies.

Incentivized

• We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
• Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
• Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.

Incentivized

• Positive only- Vrealize suite helps is IT automation by making it cost-effective and efficient.
• Less time is consumed by our IT administrators because of Automating process and they can do better monitoring
• It can be really cost effective for if any company wants to make private cloud. It did the same with us as through vCloud we get all the VMware software required.

Incentivized