HashiCorp Vagrant vs. SUSE Manager

If you're writing software, particularly software that depends on other services (web servers or databases for example) then Vagrant is great. I know some people skip Vagrant and just set up virtual machines on their own, but I've found that Vagrant streamlines the process nicely and makes it easy to update or swap out versions. If you're a web developer (which I am) it's amazing. I can have several boxes configured for my different projects and I just spin them up or down based on what I'm working on. One scenario where this might not be ideal is if you're running Vagrant on a computer that has limited resources. Since you're running a virtual machine with its own operating system and such you'll want a host computer with enough RAM, hard drive space and CPU to run the virtual machine properly without killing the performance of the host. The virtual disks can also take up a lot of space if you're not careful so if you have many virtual machines provisioned and don't clean up the old ones that you're not using, you may find that your hard drive is full. Each of my Linux servers take up about 10GB of disk space.

Incentivized

In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.

Incentivized

• Easy to create machines with different OS's, list of them can be found from Vagrant's website with configuration details.
• Flexible configuration, user can determine what software will be pre-installed to machine. Saves time because it doesn't need to be done manually every time.
• Easily manage full environments, not just single machines, with single command.

Incentivized

• Manage the content lifecycle of our products over multiple environments.
• Use salt to its fullest extent, including pre-generated states that make installation and configuration very easy.
• Manage repositories.
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Make it easy to bootstrap new systems.

Incentivized

• Learning curve is steep - It can be challenging for someone to set up initially. After some coaching, the basics come pretty quickly though.
• Relies on external Virtual Machine applications - It would be great if Vagrant itself could run the virtual machine instead of leaning on other virtualization software. This is a small detail, but would make setup simple.
• Better support for running

Incentivized

• The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome.
• More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have.
• Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required.

Incentivized

Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.

Incentivized

I am expanding the use of SUSE Manager throughout our organization and can't imagine going back to the "wild wild west" we had before.

A GUI would be nice for entry level users.

Incentivized

The gui is extremely user friendly. The installation and configuration does have a learning curve, it takes a while to set everything up. But once you're passed this initial learning curve, everything is very intuitive. If you want extra automation, there's an api (eventough i personally find the documentation of the api could be ordered better). I gave this product a 9 because of the initial learning curve and the api documentation, but for the rest it suits my needs perfectly.

Incentivized

SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.

Docker has a few advantages, especially with the disk size bloat brought on by Vagrant's hosting an entire OS and project in a VM. It relies on native tools, however, and may not support every software. Vagrant provides uniformity, efficiency and repeatability within team work and for deployment and testing.

Incentivized

The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.

Incentivized

• Saved lots of time by being able to set up a local env quickly
• Occasionally made troubleshooting bugs harder than it would have been using native Linux
• Clients had issues setting it up, which may have provided us some security in keeping their business

Incentivized

• Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped.
• 24/7 support team.
• Automatic deployment.

Incentivized