SUSE Manager Ansible Integration Becomes Fully Supported

A few weeks ago, SUSE released SUSE Manager 4.3.7.  This release includes some notable features: 

• Stability. This is the seventh enhancement of SUSE Manager 4.3, which was released in June 2022.  This means that the solution is rock solid and capable of managing all your Linux distros.  And moving to SUSE Manager 4.3 today means you’ll be fully supported until June 2025.
• Official Support of Ansible Playbooks.  While SUSE Manager has had the ability to simply re-use and run your Ansible playbooks since version 4.2 –  it’s only been a tech preview.  With this release, we take it out of tech preview and make it an officially supported part of SUSE Manager.

Why Ansible? 

Configuration and automation platforms have become increasingly important to control an organization’s ever-growing IT landscape. While there are a variety of popular tools in the market, many of you have already made investments in Ansible. 

Because SUSE as a company believes in the power of open source, adopting SUSE Manager does not mean you must give up your Ansible playbacks and lose your investment. Instead, SUSE Manager lets you to simply re-use and run your Ansible playbooks, saving time and resources by consolidating tools while keeping existing automation investments. This means you do not have to re-implement your Ansible automation solution, making migration to the SUSE landscape easier. 

Combined with its strong Salt capabilities, integration with Ansible enhances SUSE Manager’s configuration and automation capabilities helping you to orchestrate even the largest environments – across cloud and on-premises. 

Additionally, SUSE Manager itself can be managed with Ansible. As a result, users can combine SUSE Managers capabilities with pre-existing Ansible environments such as AWX.  AWX is the open source upstream project that allows you to manage Ansible playbooks, inventories, and schedule jobs to run using the web interface. 

Take Control of Your Automation 

While SUSE Manager uses Salt internally, with the SUSE Manager Server acting as a salt-master, and supports Salt clients both as salt-minion (with agent) and salt-ssh (agentless) clients, we recognize the popularity of Ansible.   

With this release, System administrators can easily operate their Ansible Control Nodes using SUSE Manager. Supported features are: 

• Introspection of inventory files 

Define an inventory path and use SUSE Manager to introspect its contents. Do this on the System Details > Ansible > Inventories page by clicking an inventory path in this page.  This will execute the inventory introspection on the Control Node in real-time. 

•  Discovery of playbooks 

After defining a playbook directory, you can discover playbooks on the System Details > Ansible > Playbooks page. This discovery runs on the Control Node in real-time. 

• Execution of playbooks 

You can schedule a playbook execution from the System Details > Ansible   Playbooks page. Simply, select the inventory file for the execution from the drop-down menu choose the time of the playbook execution or select an action chain.  SUSE Manager executes the playbook as an action on the Control Node and shows  the result of the operation on the action details page.

More information can be found here.

Discover SUSE Manager 

SUSE Manager is the only Linux management solution that manages over 16 Linux distributions from a single console.  From automation to patch management to central control, SUSE Manager really can manage any Linux, anywhere, and at any scale. 

And by supporting Ansible, we’ve lowered the bar of entry for you to experience SUSE Manager; use the automation platform your familiar with.  Simplify IT management with a comprehensive solution that empowers you to efficiently orchestrate even the most complex environments, spanning across cloud, edge, and on-premises infrastructure. 

Learn more about SUSE Manager by watching this video.