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19 A SUSE Manager 2.1 and 3.2 Product Comparison

You may already have experience managing your systems using SUSE Manager 2.1. The good news is all the features you are used to working with, (regarding the traditional stack) have not changed. The only real exception is that the original built-in monitoring feature has been removed. Icinga, a third party monitoring solution is included within the SUSE Manager Tools Channel for SLES 12. SUSE Manager 3.2 supports managing systems via the popular IT orchestration engine Salt, in addition to the previously existing traditional management stack.

Important: Selecting a Management Method

You cannot and should not mix a single system with both methods although you can have Salt managed systems and traditionally managed systems coexisting and managed by a SUSE Manager server. You may for example have a development department and assign all machines in this department as Salt minions, likewise you could also have a production department and assign machines as traditional bootstrap clients. Remember a single machine is either traditionally managed or Salt but never both.

Keep in mind that minions are not traditional clients and their feature set is currently limited. Future maintenance updates will provide feature parity over time and your feedback for prioritization of these features is welcome! The following tables provide a comparison between each feature set. This includes features in development and features available only to their parent management stack.

Table 19.1: Comparing Traditional Management and Salt Management #

Feature/Function	Traditional Management	Salt Management
Registration	bootstrap/rhnreg_ks	bootstrap scripts and Web UI
Install Packages	Supported	Supported
Install Patches	Supported	Supported
Remote Commands	Supported	Supported
System Package States	Unsupported	Supported
System Custom States	Unsupported	Supported
Group Custom States	Unsupported	Supported
Organization Custom States	Unsupported	Supported
System Set Manager	Supported	Supported
Service Pack Migration	Supported	Supported
Virtualization Host Management: Auto-installation/bare metal installation support	Supported	Supported (read-only)
System Redeployment: With Auto-installation	Supported	Coming Soon
Contact Methods: How the server communicates with a client	osad, rhnsd, ssh push	zeromq: Salt default salt-ssh
Red Hat Network Clients RHEL 6, 7	Supported	Supported
SUSE Manager Proxy	Supported	Supported
Action Chains	Supported	Supported
Software Crash Reporting	Supported	Unsupported
Staging	Supported	Supported
Duplicate Package Reporting Example: Multiple Versions of the Linux Kernel	Supported	Supported
SCAP Auditing	Supported	Supported
Support for Multiple Organizations	Supported **	Supported **
Package Verification	Supported	Under Review
System Locking	Supported	Under Review
Configuration File Management	Supported	Supported
Snapshots and Profiles	Supported	Under Review (Profiles are supported, syncing is not)
Power Management	Supported	Coming Soon

Warning: Isolation Enforcement **

SUSE Manager 2.1 is multi-tenant and organizations are completely isolated from one another. This isolation includes both privacy and security.

For example: User A in Org_1 cannot see user B in Org_2. (This relates to any data specific to an organization including: servers, channels, activation keys, configuration channels, files and so on.)

In SUSE Manager 3.2 Salt currently does not support any level of multi-tenancy and therefore information specific to an organization is accessible across organizations. For example:

salt '*' cmd.run "some_dangerous_command"

The above command will target all organization, groups and single systems including their files, channels, activation keys etc. This should be kept in mind when working with Salt.

The following table provides an overview of differences in functionality between SUSE Manager 2.1 and 3.2.

Table 19.2: Comparing SUSE Manager 2.1 and 3.2 Functionality #

Functionality	SUSE Manager 2.1	SUSE Manager 3.2
Configuration Management	Based on Static Configuration	Redesigned with Salt Integration
Configuration Management	No Concept of States	States are Supported
Subscription Management	Limited Functionality	New Design, Full Featured
Monitoring	Traditional Monitoring Supported until End of Life	Nagios Compatible, Icinga Monitoring Server is Included
Installation Approach	Appliance Based	Installed as an Add-on
Compatibility	Compatibility Carried Forward to SUSE Manager 3	Maintains full SUSE Manager 2.1 Functionality Traditional Monitoring Removed

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