Suse Manager—Automated SAP Infrastructure Deployment

It’s well-established that using Hana and Hana-based SAP solutions like S/4, BW/4, or C/4 is closely tied to using Linux as OS platform.

With the number of SAP installations still growing—most recent official figures are 27,000 for Hana, 9,500 for S/4—the number of Linux installations is growing as well. Especially big and the biggest SAP user companies leverage the combination of Hana and Linux.

Data Center Readiness with Suse Manager

Linux has already proven its datacenter readiness extensively. But there have been some new developments, of course, concerning Hana as well as Linux. Hana 2.3 and Suse SLES for SAP Applications 15 are the most recent ones.

In this context, system management or enterprise management plays a crucial role. Through software, companies can use it to manage, control, and monitor important IT components in a datacenter.

For this purpose, the Hana and Suse SLES combination primarily leverages Suse Manager. It is currently available as version 3.2 (based on Suse SLES for SAP Applications 12 SP3/SP4). Before this year is over, it will be available as version 4.0 (based on Suse SLES for SAP Applications 15 SP1).

Simplification and cost savings

In general, Suse Manager helps to drastically reduce the complexity of Hana in Suse SLES for SAP Application environments. Components vital for enterprise operation can be individually monitored and controlled.

Furthermore, this reduces costs. That’s because manual and repetitive tasks for necessary standard platform maintenance can be fully automated.

Suse’s solution currently enables automated platform management, configuration management (even SALT-based), and security management for Hana/SLES environments. This also works for multilevel staging processes with QA, test, and production systems.

Suse Manager has been supporting DevOps environments, software-defined infrastructures, containers, and VMs (in the cloud) since version 3.1 with hardened profiles and templates.

Even more templates

In the new version of Suse Manager, templates will play an even more important role. Through individualized templates, for example, customers will be able to support the automation of SAP infrastructure deployments including SAP workload setup and the automation of high availability cluster deployments.

Customers can also expect optimized collaboration between Suse solutions beyond SLES for SAP Applications. This includes Suse CaaS platform, Suse enterprise storage, and Suse OpenStack cloud.

The upcoming version of Suse Manager will also make the question of where you deploy your SAP infrastructure obsolete. Suse Manager supports both on-prem (bare metal/virtual machines) and the cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Both business models as well as hybrid cloud concepts are no obstacle to Suse Manager. SAP customers are free to choose which one they want.