Simplified Subscription Management for SUSE Linux Enterprise

Overview

Managing server subscriptions and support entitlements has just become easier with Novell Customer Center (NCC) and the Subscription Management Tool (SMT).

Novell Customer Center

Included with SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, Novell Customer Center is a Web-based portal that provides one location for your organization to easily obtain updates and support for your SUSE Linux Enterprise based products. Thanks to the intuitive user interface, you can manage your subscriptions, including status, renewal, utilization and forecasting. And you will always stay notified of the latest software updates, and easily maintain access to them. As a result, you can ensure licensing compliance, increase productivity and reduce systems management costs.

Subscription Management Tool

The Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise goes one step further by establishing a proxy system with repository and registration targets. This helps you centrally manage software updates within the firewall on a per-system basis, while maintaining your corporate security policies and regulatory compliance.

The downloadable Subscription Management Tool is integrated with Novell Customer Center and provides a repository and registration target that is synchronized with it. This is very helpful in tracking entitlements in large deployments. The Subscription Management Tool maintains all the capabilities of Novell Customer Center, while allowing a more secure centralized deployment. It is included with every SUSE Linux Enterprise subscription and is therefore fully supported.

The Subscription Management Tool provides an alternative to the default configuration, which requires opening the firewall to outbound connections for each device to receive updates. That requirement often violates corporate security policies and can be seen as a threat to regulatory compliance by some organizations. Through its integration with Novell Customer Center, the Subscription Management Tool ensures that each device can receive its appropriate updates without the need to open the firewall, and without any redundant bandwidth requirements.

The Subscription Management Tool also enables you to locally track your SUSE Linux Enterprise devices (i.e., servers, desktops, or Point of Service terminals) throughout your enterprise. Now you can easily determine how many entitlements are in need of renewal at the end of a billing cycle without having to physically walk through the data center to manually update spreadsheets.

The Subscription Management Tool informs your SUSE Linux Enterprise devices of any available software updates. Each device then obtains the required software updates from the Subscription Management Tool. The introduction of the Subscription Management Tool improves the interaction among SUSE Linux Enterprise devices within the network and simplifies how they receive their system updates. The Subscription Management Tool enables an infrastructure for several hundred SUSE Linux Enterprise devices per instance of each installation (depending on the specific utilization profile). This offers you more accurate and efficient server tracking.

In a nutshell, the Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise provides you with:

• Assurance of firewall and regulatory compliance
• Reduced bandwidth usage during software updates
• Full support under active subscription from Novell
• Maintenance of existing customer interface with Novell Customer Center
• Accurate server entitlement tracking and effective measurement of subscription usage
• Automated process to easily tally entitlement totals (no more spreadsheets!)
• Simple installation process that automatically synchronizes server entitlement with Novell Customer Center

New in the Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11

The Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 comes with a several exciting and innovative capabilities in systems management. These capabilities include the

• Possibility to stage patches to internal managed area under full control of the site administrator. This gives the administrator the option to carry out integration testing before they fully enable the new patches onsite.
• Ability to centrally push packages to managed devices
• Improved set-up and the facilitated operation for fully disconnected ("sneakernet") configurations
• New support for System z as server hosting architecture (in addition to x86 and x86_64)
• Full integration with the new supportability infrastructure delivered with SUSE Linux Enterprise (Novell Support Link integrated in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and Novell Support Advisor from Novell Technical Services). This helps easily facilitate problem reporting and troubleshooting.

Licensing

Support for the Subscription Management Tool for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 is included with any SUSE Linux Enterprise subscription at no additional cost. The support level available is that applicable to your active SUSE Linux Enterprise subscription.