1 Overview #
The Subscription Management Tool (SMT) for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP5 allows enterprise customers to optimize the management of SUSE Linux Enterprise software updates and subscription entitlements. It establishes a proxy system for SUSE® Customer Center with repositories and registration targets. This helps you to centrally manage software updates within a firewall on a per-system basis, while maintaining your corporate security policies and regulatory compliance.
SMT allows you to provision updates for all of your devices running a product based on SUSE Linux Enterprise. By downloading these updates once and distributing them throughout the enterprise, you can set more restrictive firewall policies. This also reduces bandwidth usage, as there is no need to download the same updates for each device. SMT is fully supported and available as a download for customers with an active SUSE Linux Enterprise product subscription.
Subscription Management Tool provides functionality that can be useful in many situations, including the following:
You want to update SUSE Linux Enterprise servers.
Not all machines in your environment can be connected to SUSE Customer Center to register and retrieve updates for bandwidth or security reasons.
There are SUSE Linux Enterprise hosts that are restricted and difficult to update without putting in place a custom update management solution.
You need to integrate additional external or internal repositories.
Starting with SLE 15, SMT was replaced by RMT. If you are planning to migrate SLE 12 clients to version 15, RMT is the supported product to handle such migrations. If you still need to use SMT for these migrations, beware that the migrated clients will have all installation modules enabled.
For a feature comparison between RMT and SMT, see https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15/html/SLES-all/cha-rmt-migrate.html#sec-rmt-migrate-notes-features.