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You have more than just a few Linux servers to manage, maybe even a mixed environment of RHEL and SLES? Then SUSE Manager is the answer.
SUSE Manager gives you best of breed Linux lifecycle management based on the most mature codebase for any Linux management tool, with both RHEL and SLES support from one unified console, maintained and improved by the guys who wrote the fastest and most advanced Linux update stack on the planet.
SUSE Manager gives you the lowest possible Total Cost of Ownership for your Linux environment, from bare metal provisioning to daily patch management. SUSE Manager is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution that allows you to:
You can stay up-to-date regarding information about SUSE Manager and SUSE products:
The Web UI is now based on the Twitter Bootstrap framework, dramatically enhancing its usability on mobile devices and tablets.
SUSE Manager can be configured so that unprovisioned ("bare-metal") systems capable of PXE booting are added to an organization. After that happens, those systems will appear in the Systems list, where regular provisioning via autoinstallation is possible in a completely unattended fashion.
In SUSE Manager 1.7, the System Set Manager Autoinstallation tab could be used to re-install a system using an Autoinstallation profile. With SUSE Manager 2.1, the same tab can be used to create Cobbler system records to install an OS to a machine even if it didn't have one.
This replicates functionality provided by the Create Cobbler System Record button in Manager 1.7 for multiple systems.
SUSE Manager allows you to power on, off and reboot systems via the IPMI protocol.
SUSE Manager can group a number of operations in a sequence, called an Action Chain, so that they are all scheduled at once and performed in a particular order.
Using Action Chains can be useful when dealing with some administrative tasks, for example rebooting a systems after deploying a patch. Action chaining can also be controlled via the API. See ‘actionchain’ in the API documentation.
A SUSE Manager server announces itself via the SLP (service location protocol) service now. This can be used by clients to find the nearest SUSE Manager server to connect to.
Locking of packages on the client (via zypper) is now possible. Locking prevents a change in the state of a package. An installed package cannot be upgraded or removed. An uninstalled package cannot be installed.
This feature moves the CLI-based initial setup of SUSE Manager Server to the web UI. This setup will be started automatically after initial login into SUSE Manager.
The setup workflow will provide proxy settings, mirror credentials, and product selection, including syncing of mandatory channels.
The underlying SLES 11 base system has been upgraded to Service Pack 3 (including updates)
The SUSE Manager code has been updated to reflect the 2.1 release of the upstream Spacewalk project (including updates)
The network setup does not default to ‘dhcp’, you need to choose dhcp or static manually.
The semantics of ‘non compliant systems’ have been changed. A system is considered ‘non compliant’ if it has packages installed which are not available in a channel. A non compliant system cannot be re-installed.
The old semantics looked for packages in all available channels.
The new semantics look for packages only in channels assigned to the system.
Logging of channel synchronisation (triggered by mgr-ncc-sync) was done per channel and sync run. Every new sync created a new log file. A cron job was used to clean up older logs files.
SUSE Manager 2.1 changes this to one log file per channel. All synchronisation runs for a specific channel log to the same file. Older log files are rotated and compressed now using logrotate.
An inter server sync (ISS) between a SUSE Manager 1.7 Server as master and a SUSE Manager 2.1 Server as client will succeed but generate an error mail to the admin. The error mail is harmless and can be deleted.
When upgrading a SUSE Manager Server with Database 1.7 (using embedded Oracle DB), an additional permission (create role) will be added.
Stored procedures in PostgreSQL can now be written in the TCL language. The package pgtcl will be added on upgrade.
The status of a rebooted client is now updated immediately. There was a delay in the status update in the past.
Taskomatic, the scheduler component of SUSE Manager, has an increased memory limitation (raised from 1 GB to 2GB). This might require an increase of main memory.
spacewalk-utils, a packaged set of command line tools, continues to be L1* supported only - with some exceptions. Any of these commands needs expertise and can break your system. However, we consider these tools valuable enough to be included, but not fully supported.
* L1 (Problem determination, which means technical support designed to provide compatibility information, usage support, on-going maintenance, information gathering and basic troubleshooting using available documentation.)
The following tools of spacewalk-utils are fully supported:
auditlog-keeper:
osad:
rhnlib:
rhnpush:
spacecmd:
spacewalk-backend:
spacewalk-branding:
spacewalk-java:
spacewalk-reports:
spacewalk-setup:
spacewalk-utils:
spacewalk-web:
susemanager-schema:
susemanager:
SUSE Manager Server is a 64bit Java application with an embedded database backend. This requires sufficient CPU power and main memory. A multi-core 64bit CPU (x86_64) is required, accompanied with a minimum of 4 GB of main memory. Adding more main memory will significantly improve performance.
The database will write a recovery log, taking a lot of disk space. You need to follow a strict backup strategy to copy this log to a safe place and reclaim the disk space. See the SUSE Manager manual for details.
The SUSE Manager Server database contains all information required to manage clients. This includes all installable packages and updates as well as lists of installed packages for every client. This data requires a lot of storage space on the harddisk, typically 50 GB or more per package repository.
See the Installation guide for more details on the system requirements.
SUSE Manager Server is distributed as an appliance which bundles an operating system (SLES 11 SP3 x86_64) with the SUSE Manager Server application and a database. The installable ISO of the SUSE Manager Server appliance can be deployed on physical hardware or fully virtualized (e.g. KVM, VMware) hosts.
Installation is done in two major steps. The first installs the appliance and configures the underlying SLES 11 operating system. The second configures SUSE Manager Server and populates the database with initial data. See the Installation guide for step-by-step instructions for installing and configuring SUSE Manager Server. Upgrading from SUSE Manager Server 1.7
An existing SUSE Manager Server 1.7 installation can be upgraded to SUSE Manager Server 2.1 with the help of YaST2 wagon. This is essentially the same workflow as a SLES service pack upgrade.
After the service pack migration has finished successfully, reboot the server and run
/usr/lib/susemanager/bin/susemanager-upgrade.sh
to complete the SUSE Manager Server upgrade
Be aware that the required database schema migration can be a time-consuming process, esp. if monitoring is enabled and used.
An upgrade from SUSE Manager Server 1.2 to SUSE Manager Server 2.1 is not supported. If you still have SUSE Manager Server 1.2 running, please upgrade to SUSE Manager Server 1.7 first and then do the upgrade to SUSE Manager Server 2.1
It is also possible to migrate data from an existing Red Hat Satellite Server.
Satellite migration requires SUSE Manager Server with an external Oracle database.
The migration itself is a time-consuming process and requires careful planning and expertise. Migration needs to sync the complete database as well as all cached RPM packages. Depending on the network bandwidth and the database setup, this can take up to a day or more.
Depending on the actual database structure and contents, a server migration might also fail. Please report problems via your support channel.
On first install (i.e. before running yast2 susemanager_setup) just follow the Quick Start guide and apply available patches using either zypper patch or YaST Online Update.
In general, follow the patch description when installing updates. Only apply updates to a stopped SUSE Manager Server (spacewalk-service stop)
For changes to the database schema, running spacewalk-schema-upgrade is required. Proceed as follows:
SUSE Manager Server 1.7 can be upgraded to SUSE Manager Server 2.1 by the help of YaST wagon, similar to a SLES 11 SP2 to SP3 service pack migration.
In ISS (Inter Server Sync) setups, upgrade all slaves to 2.1 before upgrading the master.
With the purchase of SUSE Manager Server you will get an activation code. This code needs to be entered at the registration step during installation.
This code enables your SUSE Manager Server to retrieve updates from the Novell Customer Center. Regularly installing updates is a mandatory step to keep your SUSE Manager Server stable and secure. Before applying some updates the SUSE Manager services needs to be stopped and only restarted after the update has been applied. See the SUSE Manager Installation Guide for details.
SUSE Manager currently doesn't technically limit the number of deployed servers in most cases, except for a theoretical limit of 200,000 entitlements/subscriptions. Please note that this is a technical limitation and does not indicate in any way that you can deploy more servers than you have valid subscriptions for! Later releases of SUSE Manager Server will keep track of allowed and used entitlements for managed systems.
All software components embedded into SUSE Manager, like Cobbler for PXE booting, are only supported in the context of SUSE Manager. Stand-alone usage is not supported.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (SLES 12), scheduled for autumn 2014, has a new signing key for packages and repositories. If you upgraded from SUSE Manager 1.7, you need to manually accept this new key into SUSE Manager 2.1 when prompted to.
A fresh installation of SUSE Manager 2.1 will have this key included.
The Client Tools Channel contains client-side packages to enable specific functionality. Please refer to the Client Configuration Guide about which packages relate to which function. Some packages have a very specific use case and installing them blindly is discouraged.
Managing Red Hat clients requires availability of appropriate Red Hat packages. These are not available through the Novell Customer Center (NCC) but must be provided by other means, e.g. from a retired Red Hat Satellite installation.
The SUSE Manager client stack for SLES10 based systems is identical to the one used on SLES11 based systems. SLES 10 systems managed by SUSE Manager will have the ZENworks Managemen Daemon (ZMD) and the rug command line tool removed.
SUSE Manager Server 2.1 can work with version 1.7 of SUSE Manager Proxy.
Upgrade of SUSE Manager Proxy from version 1.7 to 2.1 is possible.
In case of encountering a bug please report it through your support contact.
http://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager/technical-information/contains additional or updated documentation for SUSE Manager Server 2.1.
These Release Notes are available online at http://www.suse.com/documentation/releasenotes. Further information about SUSE Manager is available at http://wiki.novell.com/index.php/SUSE_Manager
Visit http://www.suse.com for the latest Linux product news from SUSE and http://www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html for additional information on the source code of SUSE Linux Enterprise products.
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