SUSE Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Released -- Redmondmag.com

SUSE Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Released

By Kurt Mackie
11/14/2013

SUSE announced a solution this week that lets IT pros manage Linux servers from Microsoft's System Center management suite.

The new SUSE Management Pack for Microsoft System Center product works with Microsoft's System Center 2007 R2 and System Center 2012 management suites. It enables server management, both Linux and Windows, from a single console. It integrates with System Center Operations Manager to enable health checks of Linux servers, patch management and alerts, as well as allowing IT pros to schedule maintenance tasks.

The Management Pack, announced at this week's SUSECon 2013 event in Florida, also lets IT pros manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS servers if it's used with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Monitoring Linux servers also requires having the SUSE Manager Management Module in place for each server, according to the requirements described in SUSE's product flyer (PDF) for the Management Pack.

Microsoft and SUSE have been collaborating on Linux and Windows interoperability since 2006, according to Michael Miller, SUSE's vice president of global alliances and marketing. The two companies also recently collaborated on enabling Microsoft Hyper-V support for the Linux-based SUSE Cloud 2.0 product, as announced in October. SUSE Cloud 2.0 is a platform for private cloud deployments that uses the OpenStack Grizzly release.

In recent years, Microsoft has been extending product interoperability with Linux systems. Its support for Linux has been institutionalized through a subsidiary company, called "Microsoft Open Technologies," which had its one-year anniversary back in April. Various Linux distros, including SUSE Linux Enterprise, are supported on Windows Server 2012 R2 Service Pack 1, Hyper-V and Windows Azure.

System Center 2012 SP1 already has some management support for Linux, Mac and Android clients, as announced back in June. However, that support is for mobile client scenarios, rather than server management. Microsoft's scenario for mobile device management envisions using a combination of System Center Configuration Manager with Windows Intune, which is Microsoft's cloud-enabled management solution.

SUSE is a business unit of The Attachmate Group, which bought Novell Inc. in April of 2011. The Attachmate Group subsequently spun off Novell Inc. into the present SUSE and Novell companies. Attachmate continued the collaboration agreement that Novell Inc. had established with Microsoft for mixed Windows and Linux environments. That agreement had been controversial early on. Along with assuring technical interoperability, Novell Inc. had sold certificates promising legal indemnity from Microsoft for using Novell's Linux distros. The broader Linux community had condemned that deal for implying that Linux was somehow encumbered by Microsoft's intellectual property claims.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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