Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs VMware Cloud Director comparison

Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
238
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (2nd), Remote Access (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Configuration Management (1st), Network Automation (1st)
VMware Cloud Director
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Configuration Management
Cloud Management
 

Featured Reviews

Joseph Merusi - PeerSpot reviewer
Everything has worked better since we started using it
Sometimes the syncing is inconsistent. I'm confident that the devices are checking in every eight hours, but sometimes the devices aren't picking up the settings as quickly as I would expect. Some features haven't been updated in a while, and Microsoft doesn't seem interested in developing them. Unless you talk to an engineer, you don't know whether there will be an update. There are communication issues, so you might start working with a feature without knowing if it will be deprecated six months from now. Some reporting areas still need development. For example, I noticed that the reporting for driver updates is still confusing.
Surya Chapagain - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to manage and simple to learn
We use Red Hat a lot. I open tickets for the Red Hat cases, however, with Ansible, I haven't opened any cases. My manager worked with them a bit. If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides crystal clear dashboarding and allows you to manage and monitor your infrastructure
The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear. The ability to switch from one infrastructure to another infrastructure and get into detailed information, whether it is compute, storage network, or whatever. That helps you get a holistic view of the overall infrastructure running in your landscape. This also helps the leadership and management be aware of the right potential investment strategy by looking at the potential utilization. vCloud Director also provides ways and means through which you can make a prediction or a forecast of the infrastructure that would be needed in the future, depending on what you are currently running. That does not take away the fact that we have to be completely aware of our pipeline projects in our schedule so that you can plan your infrastructure requirements accordingly. vCloud Director provides multifold features that have been beneficial to the end users.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"In terms of technical support, you will get an immediate response."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Intune is patching-related capabilities."
"There are no complaints about the stability. It works one hundred percent of the time."
"The navigation, the keys, and the settings are easy to find. It is easy to understand."
"I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"The best features include the management, which is quite good, and endpoints."
"The biggest asset is the range of device management options available with Intune, whether it is a Windows device, a Linux device, a Mac device, or mobile devices."
"We can manage and standardize security across your environment, identify problems, receive alerts, and so on. That's its purpose, and that's also why it's so good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master)."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"There are so many models that I don't have to create one."
"The reason I like Ansible is, first, the coding of it is very straightforward, it's very human-readable. I'm also on a contract, and I can clearly iterate and bring people up to speed very quickly on writing a Playbook compared with writing up a Puppet manifest or a Salt script."
"The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."
"We can automate a few host configurations using the product."
"vCloud is a good platform for visualization. It is very handy for monitoring. VMware can integrate with all monitoring systems like vRealize, and the management monitoring is good. I'm very happy with VMware. VMware is good in management and monitoring systems."
"The overall dashboarding is very crystal clear."
"vCloud Director is a stable solution."
"The reliability and flexibility of networking are valuable."
"We consider it intuitive and user-friendly. It offers a variety of functions for the customer to control the networking, virtual workloads, disk snapshots, and all of vSphere's core features."
"They can do any provisioning for the virtual machines. For instance, they will only see those resources if we allocate 10 Ghz database storage. The limitation is due to our setup: we need to ensure customer isolation, as vCloud Director supports multi-tenancy."
"The most valuable features are the UI, the interface, and accessibility."
"It has helped us with user segmentation and QA."
 

Cons

"It needs incorporation of Knox, ZeroTouch, etc."
"Intune is not the most user-friendly mobile device management platform available."
"It would be better if I could integrate it with my core group policy. I would like to have a group policy in my current environment, which has strict control, but those things are still missing. Although it has maximum compliance and security, it's not available on-premise."
"Microsoft needs to enhance device-level security, as sometimes when using Microsoft Intune, the device's operating system becomes stuck and requires a full uninstall to remove the Intune bug."
"It would be better if they can reduce the cost of the license."
"Intune has some limitations when it comes to application updates for third-party applications. You can schedule an update, but when it's a package setup, you need to supercede and replace it each time."
"One area for improvement is app deployment. Another is the Windows update rollout. If you're rolling out an object to a device that's offline, Intune stops trying to reach this device after it sits idle for a bit. We are forced to find a workaround that could help manage that."
"I'd like some more reporting so that I don't have to delve into PowerShell and I can pull more of the local device information such as memory, apps installed, etc. It would be nice to be able to see the apps that are present there but might not be managed. For example, if they installed 7Zip, it could report that back via an installed program or feature to see what was currently installed."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"Networking needs to be improved."
"At this time, I do not have anything to improve. What we struggle with is the knowledge base, but that is more about us having to go and find it and learn the platform on our own rather than an actual Ansible issue."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"It would be beneficial to have enhanced integration capabilities with third-party solutions within vCloud Director, especially in networking and data security."
"If I just need to look for something quickly, it's quite difficult to find it with the way it's set up now. They should make the search button better."
"It could be more stable. We have had issues with multiple different versions."
"It would be beneficial if some features were built into the platform rather than requiring integration with multiple products, reducing complexity and licensing concerns."
"It would be nice to see some new features in respect of the GUI."
"The solution's installation is difficult, and you need somebody with the solution's knowledge to do the installation."
"The tool needs to add more features to improve the console."
"The initial setup of the vCloud Director was not complex and not easy, it was in the middle range of difficulty. It could be made easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our Office 365 Business Premium license, including Office 365 and Intune Management, offers excellent value."
"It comes as a bundle, so you do not really know what the prices are. Microsoft does not break it down to the user cost for us. It is just bundled with our E5 license."
"The Intune license model is costly."
"Microsoft Intune is more expensive than other solutions, but it offers a wider range of features and control."
"The clients pay for a license and each can have a different type of license, such as an E3 or E5."
"We have the business premium licenses for the solution."
"Microsoft offers some licensing where it's included at no extra cost when customers are already using the licenses. In such a case, it's a really good value. If you have to buy the licensing for it, it's probably on par with other solutions. It isn't substantially more or less expensive. The great thing is that it is included in some of Microsoft's licensed packages. So, some customers don't have to spend additional money for it. Typically, most providers that support Intune do charge a management fee of some sort or some fee. Certainly, we're no exception."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."
"The pricing is pretty standard."
"I am using the community edition of the solution which is free."
"It’s an open-source tool."
"Red Hat's open source approach was a factor when choosing Ansible, since the solution is free as of right now."
"Customers need to pay yearly for the license."
"Like many Red Hat products, they have a no-cost version of the web application (AWX, formerly Ansible Tower), but you are on your own to install and it is a little more complicated than just installing Ansible."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an affordable solution."
"The solution is costly, efficient, and robust versus alternative solutions."
"vCloud Director is a very expensive solution."
"In certain cases, the price of Cloud Director is quite high, especially with the load balancing and other features they've introduced. That seems quite costly. Overall, for VSPP programming, I think it's okay. However, features like enterprise load balancing and all these other things are very costly."
"It runs our company in the millions of rand every month."
"My company has no problems with the pricing of the product as we got good discounts from VMware."
"If ten is very expensive, I rate the tool's price as a four out of ten."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"We pay monthly for all of the licenses."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Configuration Management solutions are best for your needs.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
32%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?
Microsoft Intune is a great tool for managing a mobile device fleet while keeping access control. The solution makes ...
What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...
How does Google Cloud Identity compare with Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune offers not only an easy-to-deploy data protection and productivity management solution, but also ...
What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management h...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that ...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
Would you change anything about VMware vCloud Director if you could?
VMware vCloud Director works very well and there are not many things that I would like to see changed. However, a sin...
What is the biggest improvement you saw at your company after you started using VMware vCloud Director?
For my company, VMware vCloud Director noticeably increased operational efficiency. When I started working here a few...
Is vCloud Director convenient for building applications?
When it comes to building applications, vCloud Director offers you various methods to create cloud-ready ones. For e...
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
Ansible
vCloud Director
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
MicroStrategy, National Democratic Institute, and NYSE Euronext.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Microsoft, HCLSoftware and others in Configuration Management. Updated: February 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.