Suse Manager 4.x - features that bring value ebook pdf

SUSE Manager
Features that bring value
SUSE Intermediate Training
2022

You don't always want to see
talk speeds and feeds. We
know that. And it’s good advice
—especially when not all of
you’re org including business
decision makers could possibly
not be terribly technical
themselves, and that's ok!
That said, there are those
features in every product that
make a big difference to even
the least-technically savvy
customers out there. And if we
can couch those features in
ways that highlight the benefits
they can offer to the business,
you’ll find that those features
can become major
differentiators between what
Suse is offering, and what a
other offerings are bringing to
the table.
So let’s take a look at those
features that make big business
impact… in a way that non-
technical decision makers are
going to understand.
Copyright © SUSE 2020 2
Features that bring value to IT’s value-chain

Copyright © SUSE 2020
3
Click to Select…
Console-based
Management
Automation
Asset Management
OS Provisioning
Patch Management
Remote
Management
Silicon Agnostic
Distro Agnostic
Flex Management
Compliance
Siloes
Deployment
Agnostic
Content Lifecycle
Management
Virtualization
Management
Monitoring

Asset Management
You can’t manage what you can’t see.
If you don’t know exactly what Linux
assets you have, IT can’t inventory
what you’ve got and certainly can’t
manage it. And your business could be
liable for licensing and other
compliance audits because you can’t
prove what you’ve got and whether it’s
operating within regulatory standards.
The first thing SUSE Manager does is
inventory every asset in the Linux
estate. So you know exactly what you
have and you know what state it’s in,
and you know whether or not it poses
a risk to your business…and if it does,
how to fix immediately it so it does no
harm.
4

Automation
Any IT task done by hand is a risk to your business. IT
admins are only human. And if they’re applying a single
task to dozens (or hundreds) of Linux servers, they’re
going to make mistakes, touching each server by hand.
Mistakes turn into business problems as your services go
dark or slow down. It’s also incredibly expensive: If you’ve
got just 50 servers, a fifteen-minute task can turn into
nearly a million dollars annually. That’s how expensive it
gets.
5
Automation takes simple IT tasks and
applies them consistently across the
estate, targeting any number of servers.
So you’re only paying for that fifteen
minutes once—not dozens or hundreds of
times. SUSE Manager uses the industry
standard Salt to make a lot of this
happen.

6
Console-based
Management
You don’t even have to say the word “console.” But what you
might want to say is this:
Suggest an alternative: A single Linux management tool that
brings it all together under just one console. Every vital distro.
Every major hardware platform. All the hypervisors. On-prem
and in the cloud. Containers and all the devices: Edge and IoT
and embedded.
Just one tool. And a single view into the estate, so nothing falls
through the cracks…not security, not compliance, not
vulnerabilities. Oh, and it saves money. Why spend so much on
standard IT management when you can save so much time and
money, and put what you save back into the business?
Most Linux estates are managed by hand. IT goes to
every server one by one. They use different tools for
each setup. They’re flying blind because they can’t see
the whole thing. Doing it this way—it costs a lot of
money. It introduces errors that could hurt your
business. And it puts you in a bad spot when it comes
to compliance.

Content Lifecycle
Management
The concept of Content Lifecycle Management isn’t new. It
applies to any “piece” of digital content and follows it from
the beginning, middle, and end of its creation and use.
SUSE Manager 4.1 applies this idea to software intended
for rollout to production systems, providing enhanced
package staging through a new Content Lifecycle
Management (CLM) user interface, with improved APIs for
managing packages, patches and configurations. This allows
IT and DevOps to move packages across multiple stages—
like Development, QA, and Production—as a simple
dashboard task. And it makes it possible to customize
software, adjust each piece as required for their
environment, and thoroughly test them before installing
these packages onto Production systems.
Only SUSE Manager combines software content lifecycle
management with a centrally staged repository, class-
leading configuration management, automation, and
(optional) state-of-the-art monitoring capabilities for all
major Linux distributions.

Compliance
Compliance is scary. There are so many rules and
regulations, and there’s so much at stake. Your
business could be hit with fines for not meeting
compliance standards. Even for things like how
your IT infrastructure is configured or how often
it’s patched.
Doesn’t seem fair. Especially when it comes to
Linux, where IT maintains these systems by hand
and can’t see the infrastructure as a whole. A lot
can fall through the cracks. Including compliance.
But SUSE Manager makes it easy by managing
the entire Linux infrastructure as a single control
plane. Everything is automated, so there’s no
human error. IT can see it all, proactively manage
vulnerabilities, and make sure the system is
operating within compliance standards.
Source: Wikipedia
Click for more.

Compliance
SUSE Manager can:
• Audit the entire infrastructure.
• Check if the system is vulnerable to specific
CVEs.
• Perform configuration and vulnerability scans to
verify the presence of patches.
• Check system configuration settings and
examine systems for signs of compromise.
• Log all auditing activities and formats.
• Get reports with just a few mouse clicks.
• And more!
9

Deployment Agnostic
Most operating system (OS) software is specifically built to run in the environment it’s targeted for. There’s a difference in
the build depending on whether the OS is going to be run on bare metal, virtual machines, or in the cloud. That makes it
tough to manage workloads on or between these different environments.
SUSE Manager is “deployment agnostic,” meaning you can put your workloads anywhere and manage them all using a
single tool, no matter where you’re running them: Bare metal, VM, cloud, container, edge, embedded, or IoT.

Distro Agnostic
Each Linux distro comes with its own
toolset. Which means your IT staff
essentially has to manage each Linux
distro separately. If they’ve got more than
one Linux distro in-house (and most of
them do), they’re using a lot of tools to
manage the Linux estate.
That’s expensive. It’s time consuming. And
it’s prone to risk.
SUSE Manager, though, manages all of
these distros from a single console…and
then automates IT tasks. Which is far less
expensive. Takes a lot less time. And
eliminates the risk of human error.

Flex Management
There’s a difference in the way IT
manages from a GUI dashboard and
a command line. And while GUI
dashboards enable push-button
management ease, many admins like
the fine control of command-line
interaction.
SUSE Manager allows IT to choose
which method works best for them,
supporting both GUI and command-
line management.
Dashboard Management
Command-line Management

Monitoring
SUSE Manager 4.1 adds in-depth and
customizable monitoring to what IT can already
visualize, using two open source projects—
Prometheus and Grafana.
Prometheus allows IT to monitor the system in
real time. IT defines the parameters of the
metrics it wants and Prometheus pulls that data
into a time-stamp database.
Grafana is a visualization tool…and with it, IT can
pull almost any kind of data into a dashboard they
can customize to show them just about anything
they want to see.
Prometheus and Grafana expand what SUSE
Manager already “sees.” With this capability, IT
can see containers, VMs, remote sites…anything
they need insights into. Any service SUSE
Manager manages, IT can now monitor…even
SUSE Manager itself.
This advanced monitoring capability is a cost
subscription that you need to upsell as often as
possible.
Click for more.

Monitoring
Monitoring was already in 4.0 but enhancements to 4.1 make it possible
to:
• Automate the deployment of a monitoring infrastructure—like
provisioning Prometheus and Grafana servers.
• Set up and manage the monitoring probes (exporters) you need to
run.
• Provide several out-of-the-box customized dashboards.
• Do Prometheus service discovery: Automate the configuration of
your Prometheus servers to start scraping metrics from the systems
running exporters.
• Achieve Federation: Collect the monitoring data from multiple
Prometheus servers and send them to a central aggregator. This is
great for consolidating data from remote sites, achieving HA, and
scaling.
• Set up pre-configured default alerting rules.
• Add to security with reverse proxy by exposing metrics from all your
Prometheus exporters on a single HTTP port.
14

OS Provisioning
15
When your business needs room to move, you need it to happen
fast. But a lot of your business services run on IT infrastructure, and
the last thing you want to do when opportunity strikes is wait around
for IT to get servers up and running before you can act.
The thing about provisioning is, it takes time. SUSE Manager cuts that
time down with rapid setup that makes it possible for your business
to move quickly and be more agile.

Patch Management
Patching saves businesses.
Truth: Your IT infrastructure is like a boat. Too many
holes sink the ship. And what IT is patching against
are vulnerabilities that can slow the performance
of business-critical systems and even bring them
down. Or allow a host of viruses to attack your
company from the inside and potentially
compromise the integrity of your hard-won
reputation.
We know: Patching can be time consuming (and
thus expensive), so sometimes IT does it sparingly.
But that’s a gamble. With SUSE Manager, you don’t
have to risk your business: IT can cascade patches
to all systems in the environment or a group of
systems that need a particular patch…quickly
protecting against breach and lowering your
operating costs significantly.
Click for more.

Patch Management
In fact, with SUSE Manager, IT can do patch staging: They
can create a dev, test, and production environment and
move the patch through the stages to ensure it's tested—
so you know nothing breaks—before going into
production.
This feature is especially important for mission-critical
systems like SAP…and it’s a selling feature for these
customers.
17

Remote
Management
18
The last thing you want to spend your money on is travel. Especially
when it’s paying an IT admin to fly or drive somewhere to fix or
manage a server. But most of the time, that’s what it takes. If your IT
staff can’t manage Linux remotely, they’re doing it by hand…and it’s
costing you a fortune to make it happen.
SUSE Manager can manage Linux anywhere it’s located. Down the
hall. Around the world. In the cloud. So IT admins can stay right
where they are and still manage the infrastructure that runs your
business as if they were sitting right next to it. And that saves you a
lot of money.

Silicon Agnostic
Not every Linux operating system runs on multiple hardware platforms or
in the cloud. So if you have more than one platform—like z Systems,
maybe; or a Power machine—you may not be able to choose which one
runs what or how to get the best performance out of the hardware you’ve
got.
And even when Linux vendors do support multiple hardware platforms,
they don’t make it easy: Each platform has to be managed differently. That
means siloes. And siloes mean money.
SUSE Manager is silicon agnostic, which simply means: Your IT team can
manage every workload running on just about every hardware platform
you have, and they can do it exactly the same way across those platforms.
And that means you get to leverage any platform that makes sense for
your business, pay less to manage all of them, and get all of that
management firepower from a single vendor—SUSE.

Siloes
Your business services run on IT
infrastructure. Thing is, there are a lot of
things that run on your infrastructure these
days. Servers. Virtual machines. Containers.
The edge. The cloud. On-prem. Different
operating Systems. Different hardware.
Each one makes your business more agile.
But each one is unique enough to require its
own management team. And that’s
expensive.
The good news is, to SUSE Manager, a
workload is a workload. So IT can manage
each workload instead of what those
workloads are running on. And you can take
advantage of all these new ways to be agile
without worrying about the high cost of
managing those services in parallel siloes.
Source: Oracle

Virtual Machine
Management
SUSE isn’t trying to be VMware here. But the
tools to manage virtual machines (VMs) can
be expensive, and most customers are only
using a subset of those expensive tools to
manage their VMs.
So SUSE brings “just enough” VM
management capability with Salt. That
means IT can use SUSE Manager to look at
VMs as just another asset within the Linux
environment.
This is a subscription add-on, meant to allow
customers to customize their SUSE Manager
tools to meet their business needs.

Virtual Machine
Management
SUSE Manager provides users with an easy-to-use VM
management using a centralized console with a graphical user
interface. Orchestrated through Salt, IT can now use SUSE Manger
to:
• Create Xen or KVM guest VMs on a host machine that is
registered with the SUSE Manager Server.
• Automatically register guest VMs to SUSE Manager.
• Manage VMs from creation, configuration, provisioning,
auditing, upgrading and patching.
• Allocate CPU and memory resources to VMs.
• Create, update, edit, delete VMs.
• With 4.1, it’s possible to manage storage pools through the
webUI or Salt states to create, edit, start, stop, refresh and
delete storage pools.
22

Learn more.
Go to www.suse.com/products/suse-manager
SUSE Manager
Features that bring value
23

Suse Manager 4.x - features that bring value ebook pdf

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Suse Manager 4.x - features that bring value ebook pdf

Similar to Suse Manager 4.x - features that bring value ebook pdf (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Suse Manager 4.x - features that bring value ebook pdf