Item: SUSE Manager
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SUSE Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SUSE Manager is the central management system for our SLES infrastructure. We use it to initially bootstrap new systems, to have a complete overview of our landscape, to automate configuration roll out, to manage the lifecycle of our systems, to make sure all critical patches are gradually rolled out over the landscape, to audit our systems using openscap, to make sure all systems have exactly the same baseline (regarding software selections AND software versions). All in all, it is the central system, the first go-to when managing our SLES infrastructure.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Manage the content lifecycle of our products over multiple environments.
Use salt to its fullest extent, including pre-generated states that make installation and configuration very easy.
Manage repositories.
Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
Make it easy to bootstrap new systems.

Cons

The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome.
More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have.
Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required.

Most Important Features

Easy content lifecycle management.
Easy patch management.
Easy bootstrapping of systems.
Easy configuration management.

Return on Investment

Our landscape's uniformity has increased.
Our installation time of new systems was reduced.
Our configuration management was simplified.

Alternatives Considered

I have tested and evaluated Uyuni, which is basically the upstream version of SUSE Manager. We opted for SUSE Manager because we like to have a stable release that is regularly updated and has full support from our vendor.

Key Insights

Do you think SUSE Manager delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SUSE Manager's feature set?

Yes

Did SUSE Manager live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SUSE Manager go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SUSE Manager again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Likelihood to Recommend

In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.

Comments

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SUSE Manager: great value for its price