Much more with 4! Keeping your infrastructure Healthy, Secure and Compliant with SUSE Manager 4

June 26, 2019 | By: Jason Phippen

SUSE Manager 4

MORE…..

Opportunities to reduce costs and simplify management

Visibility into your Linux based servers and devices

Control over complex environments

Ok, before we dig a little into the “MORE” you could be getting with 4 let us first recap how SUSE Manager currently helps enterprise DevOps and IT operations teams.

So here’s my SUSE Manager Elevator pitch……

“SUSE Manager is a best-in-class open source infrastructure management solution for your software-defined infrastructure. It has been designed to help your enterprise DevOps and IT Operations teams to reduce complexity and regain control of IT assets, increase efficiency while meeting security policies and optimize operations with automation to reduce costs.”
So how does it do that…..?

SUSE Manager enables you Optimize operations while reducing costs with automated Linux server provisioning, patching and configuration for faster, consistent and repeatable server deployments.

It allows you to……

Easily manage and optimize usage of your SUSE subscriptions helping you to ensure you aren’t buying subscriptions you don’t need.
Improve onboarding efficiency of new hardware with automated discovery (via PXE boot).
Optimize operations by enabling IT to quickly build container images based on their SUSE Manager repositories.
Increase operational efficiency and support with a single tool (using Salt) for automated deployment of hardened OS templates (bare metal, VMs or containers) to tens of thousands of servers for faster, consistent & repeatable provisioning and configuration without compromising speed or security.

So what are the benefits……?
SUSE Manager enables you to reduce complexity and regain control of IT assets with a single tool to manage Linux systems across a variety of hardware architectures, hypervisors as well as container and cloud platforms.

Reduce complexity with a single tool that lets you easily onboard and manage any Linux server or device connected to the network no matter where it is located – in your data center, a 3^rd party data center, in the cloud, or highly distributed (i.e. Retail Stores).
Improve visibility of your infrastructure – with improved graphical visualization of your IT systems status and their relationships. Once an asset has been on-boarded, you’ll never “lose” it. So, if it goes offline or stops responding you will know. Quickly view your Linux assets and identify assets that need attention.
Simplify management and regain control of your IT assets with graphical visualization of your IT systems and their relationships as well as the capability to organize Linux servers into logical groupings – group them, tag them with additional details (location in the datacenter , Rack, etc.)
- Locate and store hardware specifics for the servers enabling grouping/tagging by hardware characteristics (vendor tags, CPU architecture, RAM)

It means you can ensure compliance with internal security policies and external regulations with automated monitoring, tracking, auditing and reporting of your systems, VMs and containers across your development, test and production environments.

Detailed compliance auditing and reporting with the ability to track all hardware and software changes made to your managed Linux infrastructure.
Easily track system compliance with automated patch management ensures daily notifications of systems not compliant with the current patch level.
Faster non-compliant remediation with the ability to quickly identify systems deployed in private, hybrid cloud and container infrastructures that are out of compliance to hardened profiles/templates based on your own internal security policies.

So that’s what we did and why we were doing it……

Now we’ve given you a lot more with 4!!

SUSE Manager 4 further delivers on our best-in-class promise of providing an open source infrastructure management solution that lowers costs, enhances availability and reduces complexity.

SUSE Manager 4 enables you to……

• Further lower costs and simplify management with enhancements to content lifecycle management making it easier to move and manage packages throughout the DevOps cycle and virtual machine management allowing near real-time management of hundreds of servers

Simplify management and reduce operational expenditure with enhanced package staging through a new Content Lifecycle Management (CLM) user interface and improved APIs for managing packages, patches and configurations. Moving packages across multiple stages, like development, QA and production is now a simple UI-based task.

Ease virtual machine management complexity with new Salt based virtual machine management that allows the near real-time management hundreds of servers. This allows managing virtual machines through a UI, with start/stop buttons, and by defining Salt states: For example, you can create a Salt state that always ensures that the same three virtual machines are created and running on all your retail branch servers!

Note: This functionality is a paid-for add-on subscription

• Increase availability and visibility with expanded monitoring and alerting capabilities enabling you to easily identify and resolve issues

Gain better infrastructure insights and reduce downtime and with the ability to provision, configure, and automate a reliable and easy to use monitoring and alerting infrastructure built on the next generation Prometheus based monitoring stack. With a single tool, you can now not just deploy, configure and manage your Linux infrastructure, but also monitor the health of that infrastructure.

Note: This functionality is a paid-for add-on subscription per managed system.

• Reduce complexity and regain control with expanded OS support and new SAP HANA deployment capabilities making easier than ever to implement install and configure SAP HANA

Regain control of complex heterogeneous IT environments with extended target OS support now including openSUSE and Ubuntu client management and simplified deployments via a unified installer.

Reduce complexity with new “Formulas with Forms” capabilities for SAP which allow the easy set-up of SAP HANA nodes and HA cluster configuration (technology preview), making it easier than ever to implement SAP’s best practices for installing SAP HANA on SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Simplify operations with an improved content staging UI and APIs enable SAP customers to easily build patch staging environments for their Linux updates that mirror their SAP infrastructure without needing to use custom scripting.