Kathy Gibson reports from a SUSE/SAB&T TEC webinar – When it comes to IT, organisations are continually looking to save money while reducing complexity.

They can do this by using SUSE Manager (SUMA), says Tinus Brink, director of consulting at SAB&T TEC.

SUMA can be used to support your entire environment – whether that consists of 50 or 5 000 connected systems, he explains.

“SUMA can support with your full content lifecycle management,” Brink says. “As part of the open source community, administrators can monitor through Prometheus, with Grafana for digital presentation.

“SUMA offers a virtualisation manager with Salt, supporting cloud operations as well as virtual machine deployment. You can do inspection of deployed virtual machines and migrations as well,” Brink explains.

A number of  Linux operating systems are supported with SUMA. SLES, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS and OEL, with Debian, Amazon Linux 2 planned soon.

SUMA also offers support for public cloud.

It allows integration for SUSE Container as a Service platforms as well, assisting developers to centralise configuration.

“SUMA goes a step further, with AutoYast booting and PXE support as well,” Brink says.

SLES for SAP allows for advanced virtual machine configuration – and automated patching during a patch cycle.

Features to come in SUMA 4.2 include Internet of Things (IoT) device management and basic management of Windows clients. Also, Salt-based security audit and remediation.

“If you invest in SUMA, you can save money now and be sure that you will be able to manage your whole environment going forward – all from one central server.”

Organisations running SAP HANA on SLES know there are some best practices that will make this easier.

These include system deployment, patch management, service patch applications, subscription managements, configuration, maintenance and compliance management.

SUSE Manager allows customers to automate these processes, to provision, manage and monitor SAP HANA to all the best standards across development and production.

“You can link all the products and activate systems in SUSE Manager,” Brink says. “You don’t have to search for patches any more, and you can manage a bigger environment with less human error.

“You can have one person managing your entire landscape,” he adds.