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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Ansible vs VMware vCenter Server

Ansible vs VMware vCenter Server

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ansible
Ansible
Stacks19.5K
Followers15.6K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars66.9K
Forks24.1K
VMware vCenter
VMware vCenter
Stacks45
Followers27
Votes0

Ansible vs VMware vCenter Server: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>
  1. Deployment Model: Ansible is an agentless automation tool whereas VMware vCenter Server relies on agents installed on managed hosts to execute tasks. This difference in deployment models affects the way the automation processes are managed and executed.
  2. Technology Focus: Ansible focuses on automating various IT tasks, including provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment, while VMware vCenter Server is specifically designed for virtualization management, resource provisioning, and monitoring within VMware environments.
  3. Integration Capabilities: Ansible offers a wide range of integrations with different technologies and services, enabling cross-platform automation, whereas VMware vCenter Server is more focused on integrating with VMware's suite of products and technologies, providing deeper integration within VMware environments.
  4. Cost Structure: Ansible is an open-source tool with a community edition available for free, while VMware vCenter Server is a proprietary software that requires licensing based on the number of CPUs or physical/virtual machines managed, potentially leading to higher costs for large-scale deployments.
  5. Configuration Management: Ansible follows a declarative approach to configuration management, defining the desired state of systems, while VMware vCenter Server utilizes a more imperative approach, issuing specific commands to achieve the desired outcomes, which can impact the flexibility and complexity of automation workflows.
  6. Scalability and Performance: Ansible is known for its scalability and performance when managing large-scale environments with thousands of nodes, leveraging its agentless architecture and parallel execution capabilities, while VMware vCenter Server may face scalability challenges in extremely large environments due to the resources required by agent-based management.
In Summary, Ansible and VMware vCenter Server differ in their deployment models, technology focus, integration capabilities, cost structures, configuration management approaches, and scalability/performance capabilities.

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Advice on Ansible, VMware vCenter

Anonymous
Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

329k views329k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ansible
Ansible
VMware vCenter
VMware vCenter

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

Gain centralized visibility, simplified and efficient management at scale, and extensibility across the hybrid cloud—all from a single console. It is advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling your VMware vSphere environments, allowing you to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure across the hybrid cloud with confidence.

Ansible's natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.;Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate "managing the management", and reclaim CPU cycles.;Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.
Simple Deployment; Proactive Optimization; Extensibility and Scalability Across Hybrid Cloud; Native Elements; Centralized Control and Visibility
Statistics
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
24.1K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
19.5K
Stacks
45
Followers
15.6K
Followers
27
Votes
1.3K
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
Cons
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 3
    Bloated
No community feedback yet
Integrations
Nexmo
Nexmo
Stackdriver
Stackdriver
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Docker
Docker
OpenStack
OpenStack
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
New Relic
New Relic
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere

What are some alternatives to Ansible, VMware vCenter?

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

cPanel

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

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