SUSE Manager for Managed Services Providers #

The Linux footprint of enterprise IT landscapes continues to grow. This growth can be particularly problematic for managed services providers (MSPs), who may need to manage systems lifecycles for many clients. As an MSP, you need a management tool that can scale with your business needs.

SUSE Manager 4.3 is an enterprise, open source management solution for software-defined infrastructure. It is designed to help enterprises reduce complexity and regain control of IT assets with a single tool. SUSE Manager provides you with systems asset management, systems provisioning, and automated software management to help you keep all your systems up-to-date and secure.

SUSE Manager easily scales to satisfy your technical and business requirements without compromising on operational performance. It gives you the features and automation in a single tool. Thus, you can seamlessly manage a broad spectrum of Linux systems on a variety of hardware architectures and hypervisors, and container, IoT, and cloud platforms. With SUSE Manager, you can manage systems lifecycle management, streamline operations, and manage your growing IT landscape.

1.3 Prerequisites #

 

For this guide, you need at least two systems. These can be bare metal or virtual machines. These will be your SUSE Manager hub and peripheral servers. If you want to explore registering client systems for management, add one or more additional systems.

For this guide, the recommended configuration for each server is:

• CPU: 8 CPU cores

• RAM: 64 GB

• Storage: 100 GB

Important

For a typical production deployment, be sure to review SUSE Manager Hardware requirements.

When sizing servers for SUSE Manager, the most important variables are CPU, RAM, and disk storage. This can be critical when implementing the hub and peripheral solution for the real world. Import and export operations involve a lot of SQL transactions, which can be CPU and memory intensive. And, you can have significant storage requirements for the database (located in /var/lib/pgsql), depending on the size and complexity of your IT landscape.

SUSE offers Consulting Services that can help you assess your needs and provide proper sizing recommendations.

Additionally, you need a way to transfer data between the servers. Ideally, this could be through a shared (NFS) file system, but you can also copy the data across the network (such as with rsync) or use a removable disk such as a USB storage device.

Managing a large and growing IT footprint can be a challenge for any enterprise. Managed services providers (MSPs) must do this for multiple customers. A single SUSE Manager server could be used to manage all customer systems. But there are key concerns with this approach, such as:

SUSE Manager empowers MSPs and large enterprises to address these concerns through:

Each of these is discussed further below.

2.2 Hub and peripherals #

 

SUSE Manager Hub was introduced to manage very large deployments by allowing horizontal scaling to multiple servers.

In this hub and peripheral topology, one SUSE Manager server acts as the central (or hub) server for one or more peripheral SUSE Manager servers. Any number of client systems can be registered to the server. Each peripheral server is an independent SUSE Manager server. By dedicating a peripheral server for each customer, an MSP can address concerns about separation of customers while still allowing centralized control.

Important

Pay special attention to the security boundaries shown in the diagram above. End customers may have access to their own SUSE Manager servers if they want. However, it is imperative that no customer be given access to the hub server because this server has control over all of the peripheral servers. A customer who can access the hub would be able to access other customers' systems.

For each peripheral server, you need to create activation keys, bootstrap, repositories, system groups, users, and so on. Similarly, any custom Salt states you create must be manually copied to the appropriate peripheral. SUSE provides a set of Salt modules, states, and formulas that can automate this process.

It is important to understand that the hub and peripheral concept was developed primarily to provide horizontal scaling. For this guide, it is being used to provide isolation between systems and any benefits from scaling are incidental to this use case.

At the center of the architecture is the SUSE Manager hub server. This server follows standard installation and setup processes. SUSE Manager can be deployed onto bare metal or virtual machines, running on-premises or in cloud environments. However, for the hub server, you must also enable the Hub XMLRPC API service.

To onboard a new customer, you start by adding the customer’s SUSE Customer Center (SCC) credentials to the hub server. You do this for each customer. Then SUSE Manager can provide you with centralized access to all subscribed products.

Alternatively, if you (as the service provider) are using your own subscriptions to provide access under an MSP agreement with SUSE, then you only need to add that subscription to the hub.

When the SCC credentials have been added, you have a centralized view of all products that are available through the hub and the ability to replicate entitlements from the hub to peripheral servers.

Follow Synchronizing Products from SUSE Customer Center to onboard a customer.

Important

To properly synchronize content lifecycle channels later, do not create a separate organization for each new customer.

Peripheral servers are SUSE Manager servers you can dedicate to a customer. Creating a peripheral server follows the normal SUSE Manager installation and setup processes. However, instead of configuring the SCC connection, you configure the peripheral server to obtain SCC content from the hub.

Peripheral servers must be registered to the hub server as Salt clients. When you register a peripheral server, you must assign it to the appropriate SUSE Manager software channel as its base channel. The best way to do this is with activation keys. You can create a specific activation key and assign the appropriate channel as the base channel with the key.

Register a peripheral server to the hub using one of the Client Registration Methods.

Note

You should create an activation key specifically for peripheral servers, especially if you will have other types of clients registered to your hub.

To register a peripheral with the SUSE Manager Web UI, you can follow these steps:

When the bootstrap process has completed, your client is listed in the Web UI at Systems > System List. The peripheral server can now be managed as a standard Salt client of the hub and patched in the normal way.

You need to ensure that your SUSE Manager servers stay aligned on content. This is accomplished using Inter-Server Synchronization.

zypper install inter-server-sync

7.2 Building customer-specific content lifecycle management #

 

Content lifecycle management (CLM) allows you to customize and test software before deploying to production systems. As an MSP, each of your customers may have different software needs, testing requirements, and deployment schedules. It can be quite challenging to manage CLM for all of your customers.

SUSE Manager provides the flexibility you need to define and manage content lifecycles for your business and your customers. You begin by creating customer-specific software channels. These are then assigned to appropriate, managed clients.

For example, suppose you have a customer called ACME Corp. You can create a Content Lifecycle Project only for this customer as follows:

1. In the SUSE Manager Web UI, navigate to Content Lifecycle > Projects.

2. Click Create Project

3. In the Name field, type a name for this project.

4. In the Label field, type the name that will be used internally.

5. In the Description field, you can add a more verbose explanation.

You can now proceed to build the CLM for this customer in the usual manner by adding sources and environments in the usual manner. To learn more, see Content Lifecycle Management.

7.3 Exporting and importing content #

 

After defining customer-specific channels as part of your content lifecycle management (CLM), use the inter-server-sync command to export these channels from the SUSE Manager hub to a directory. This directory and its contents needs to be transferred to the peripheral server. The easiest way to do this is to use a shared file system.

The example below shows how to export the development environment from the ACME Corp customer’s CLM to an NFS file system mounted at /mnt/shared on the hub and peripheral servers.

Note

Exporting can take considerable time to run and is very CPU intensive. It copies all of the required packages and creates all of the SQL commands needed to recreate the channel structure and contents on the importing server.

1. Export the CLM on the hub server.

   1. On the hub server command line, change to the shared directory.

      cd /mnt/shared

   2. Initiate the export.

      inter-server-sync export --channel-with-children acmecorp-acmedev-sle15sp4-sle-product-sles15-sp4-pool-x86_64

      

      Tip

      The inter-server-sync export command outputs to the current directory by default. You could specify an output directory with the --outputDir flag. Get detailed help on the export command with inter-server-sync export -h.

   3. Verify that the export succeeded by viewing the contents of the directory.

      ls -l

      total 457384
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root       540 Jul 11 13:38 exportedChannels.txt
      drwxr-x--- 1 root root         8 Jul 11 13:03 packages
      -rw------- 1 root root 468349180 Jul 11 13:38 sql_statements.sql.gz
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root        44 Jul 11 13:38 version.txt

2. Import the CLM on the peripheral server.

   1. On the peripheral server command line, change to the shared directory.

      cd /mnt/shared

   2. Initiate the import.

      inter-server-sync import

      

      Tip

      Get detailed help on the ISS import command with inter-server-sync import -h.

      

      Note

      There is no need to specify channel names because that is implicit in the SQL statements. You simply need to refer to the directory that contains the exported content and, by default, that is the current directory.

Clients are the end-point systems you want to manage. SUSE Manager is compatible with a wide range of client technologies. For a full list supported clients and features, see Supported Clients and Features.

There are three ways to register clients to a SUSE Manager server:

For bootstrap and command line methods, you must first create an activation key.

Important

For all methods, date and time on the client must be synchronized with the SUSE Manager server.

For details on client configuration, see the Client Configuration Guide.

Salt is a remote execution engine, configuration management, and orchestration system used by SUSE Manager. Salt uses execution and state modules to define, apply, and orchestrate configuration of your devices. You use Salt states to manage users, system groups, activation keys, and so on.

SUSE Manager provides a set of modules called Uyuni configuration modules, that you can use to configure both SUSE Manager and Uyuni Servers. You can use the Uyuni configuration modules and create your own custom Salt State (SLS) files. Salt states are defined on the hub level and can be applied to the peripheral servers.

Important

Activation keys make reference to channels, so you need to import appropriate content first.

You can use Uyuni configuration modules to configure:

The Uyuni configuration modules are available in the uyuni-config-modules package. Install this package on the SUSE Manager hub server by logging in as root and issuing the command:

zypper in uyuni-config-modules

This package also installs detailed API descriptions, indications on pillar settings, and examples. You can find these in /usr/share/doc/packages/uyuni-config-modules/.

systemctl status hub-xmlrpc-api.service

9.2 Reporting #

 

Every SUSE Manager peripheral server has its own reporting (PostgreSQL) database, where information is collected for that server and its registered clients. The hub server aggregates and stores information collected from all the peripheral servers in its own reporting database. This gives you easy access to data from all clients under management.

SUSE Manager provides some preconfigured reports that you can leverage for a variety of tasks, such as taking inventory of subscribed systems, users, and organizations. You can also use an external reporting tool to create fully customized reports.

Tip

Connect to an external reporting tool only through a user account with read-only permissions.

For more on reporting, see Reports Generation.

SUSE Manager is the enterprise, open source solution that helps you maintain control of your IT landscape. SUSE Manager provides systems asset management, systems provisioning, and automated software management to help you keep all your systems up-to-date and secure. Seamlessly manage a broad spectrum of Linux systems on a variety of hardware architectures, hypervisors, container, IoT, and cloud platforms. And easily scale your landscape to satisfy your technical and business requirements.

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