SUSE Rancher Reviews

My main use case for SUSE Rancher was majorly about container orchestration and microservices onboarding and deployments.

I was working for a Telco with my previous organization where we used SUSE Rancher for container orchestration and microservices onboarding. This Telco wanted to deploy the Kubernetes solution at the edge as well as in the centralized location. The application was developed by a telecom solution provider and was supposed to be deployed on SUSE. We used Rancher K8s and K3s for deployment, and the application had a lot of small microservices to build to cover the end-to-end application. This was the major use case.

The biggest project was the Telco deployment with SUSE Rancher, but there were some other projects as well. One was for a multi-Kubernetes management plane for a government entity here, where the customer was using multiple Kubernetes solutions across OpenShift, Tanzu, and native Kubernetes, as well as Google GKE. A single plane to manage everything was where we deployed SUSE Rancher. It was a small deployment, but the use case was significant.

SUSE Rancher is deployed in various ways in my organization and my clients' organizations. For the Telco project, it was considered hybrid because there was edge involved and private cloud. The second use case was hybrid cloud as SUSE Rancher deployment was on-premise but had multiple clouds within their on-premise infrastructure including OpenShift, Tanzu, native Kubernetes, and GKE.

In Saudi Arabia, all major deployments are locally deployed, primarily on top of VMware or bare metal solutions. While GKE and other cloud providers are integrated, Google is the only major player here right now as AWS and Azure are not available in Saudi.

The best features SUSE Rancher offers include being open source, which gives flexibility, and being open means connecting to any of the applications and monitoring or operational solutions. Additionally, there are integrations available with multiple solutions and products. This openness is basically the best thing I appreciate about SUSE, and with the help of operating system options with Linux, even enterprise applications can be onboarded.

The openness and integrations helped in my projects significantly. For example, there is a monitoring feature. A customer had different monitoring tools within the environment, and bringing in specific monitoring tools and capabilities would require a team to deploy and figure out how to do it. The openness helped in integrating the existing tools with SUSE Rancher itself, which was the biggest use case. There were a lot of APIs and openness available so that the existing tools could be integrated, and the customer did not have to train their teams again. In the enterprise environment, this is crucial. Another example is flexibility—customers using SAP on SUSE Linux is one of the biggest use cases with SUSE, and that also helped in deploying and migrating their application from legacy solutions to new solutions.

SUSE Rancher positively impacted our organization by modernizing applications. This application modernization journey is good with the Kubernetes solution, and while you can adopt any Kubernetes option, SUSE provided me the flexibility with openness to adapt to our architecture needs and multiple options within SUSE's own technology stack, including Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring. These are the benefits, as the organization also didn't have to train much or upskill their teams since they were already familiar with the product—SUSE has been around for 20 to 25 years, which is good.

One of the major challenges I faced with SUSE Rancher was during a POC for one customer who was using VMware. There was a significant challenge between VMware CSI and SUSE integrations. We had to move that deployment from VMware, which the customer wanted, to a bare metal solution. Flexibility also means better integrations with major industry solution providers like VMware, which many enterprise organizations use.

The integrations with SUSE Rancher are fine, as long as you have open APIs, anyone can connect. For me, there were no challenges because we had standard products already certified. However, the integration between VMware and SUSE could definitely be improved.

I chose 7 out of 10 because I faced VMware-related challenges as I explained. A lot of customers are still on VMware, while many also use Red Hat solutions, especially with the IBM push now. The marketing and outreach need to increase to penetrate more accounts, which are the two improvements I suggest.

I have been using SUSE Rancher for almost three years in my previous role.

SUSE Rancher is stable with no issues.

SUSE Rancher's scalability is effective; I do not think there is an issue with it. While I have not done larger deployments involving 10,000 to 20,000 nodes, I have worked on a Telco project with approximately 128 to 140 nodes.

The customer support for SUSE Rancher is good. Since we were the partner for deployment, customer support was especially robust from the presales team at SUSE. The Middle East team is good, and I have not encountered issues requiring extensive follow-up with support after handing over to the customer for future management.

Positive

I have seen a return on investment from using SUSE Rancher, with relevant metrics indicating money and time saved. For instance, if migration requires six months and we finish it in four months, we save two months of time, allowing our team to focus on other tasks. Although I would not say there were fewer employees, it involves either upskilling current staff or hiring new ones. The good amount of time saved turns into ROI. Regarding different solutions, I have used Tanzu, native Kubernetes, and OpenShift within our customer requirements, and we proposed SUSE Rancher based on what fits best.

There was a measurable impact after implementing SUSE Rancher. The end-to-end deployment was at least 30 percent cheaper than OpenShift, which was the biggest criterion since customers are cost-conscious. In terms of time saving, while any Kubernetes control plane adoption takes a similar amount of time, the migration from legacy SAP to SAP on SUSE Linux on Kubernetes helped reduce a lot of time in the migration. If something was supposed to take six months with another Kubernetes solution, here it only took around three to four months for end-to-end transformation, which was good.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for SUSE Rancher was positive. Getting licenses was easy as I worked directly with the SUSE team for assistance. The costs compared well with local vendors, especially against Tanzu and OpenShift. Licensing, which is per unit based, was straightforward, and since I worked with a partner, there were no significant setup challenges. The only challenge was that our team needed to be trained to ensure smooth deployments.

Before choosing SUSE Rancher, I evaluated other options, including OpenShift, Rancher, and Tanzu, along with public cloud solutions including GKE, especially since the customer wanted managed services.

My advice for others looking into using SUSE Rancher is to try it and not just opt for OpenShift just because it is the leading product. If your use case allows, give it some time because people also need to adapt to a new product. The only thought I would add is to keep improving the integrations and VMware onboardings. I think this will elevate SUSE Rancher to being the best in the world. I gave this review a rating of 7 out of 10.

SUSE Rancher is used in my current day-to-day activities for multi-cluster management, including Kubernetes on-premises, on cloud, using EKS, GKS, and AKS. This is the primary use in our current environment.

We usually deploy SUSE Rancher on multiple AWS regions, multiple Azure regions, and multiple Google Cloud regions, and on different data centers on-premises. Managing all these different clusters at one place without using tools such as SUSE Rancher is very difficult. SUSE Rancher helps us in bringing all these clusters together at one place.

We manage using SUSE itself, using multi-tenancy applications and multi-cluster, multi-region, and multi-data center clusters at a single place.

SUSE Rancher is best used for large-scale applications such as ours. It manages very high-end infrastructure, and it has very good customer support. It is very easy to understand in terms of usage.

It definitely improved reliability. It definitely saved a lot of time, but there is a lot of scope for improvement as compared with other tools in the market.

There are multiple areas where SUSE Rancher can improve. The most pressing issue that I found in SUSE Rancher is that it is a bit slow. Compared with Komodor, it is very slow. Maintenance is also very high, and we require regular maintenance. Non-experts in Kubernetes cannot handle this application. It is a bit less stable compared with other tools in the market.

In most regions, there is scope for improvement.

There is a lot of scope for improvement, and there are a lot of issues in the tool, such as addressing the errors, addressing the stability, and addressing the reliability. It is a very good tool, so that is why I gave it a nine. However, it is not a great tool to get a ten.

It is a bit costly compared with other tools in the market.

I have been using SUSE Rancher for the past three years in my current role.

Most of the time it is stable.

It is usually error-prone and is affected by errors a lot of the time.

There are some areas where it can improve, such as on the stability and reliability side.

It is scalable pretty well, with a rating of nine out of ten.

The customer support is very friendly, and they are very fast in addressing the issues. The user interface is also very simple to understand, with nothing fancy in terms of complexity.

Customer support is very great.

Positive

I did not use any solution before, but after this, we used a few other solutions that we are exploring.

I cannot provide the details, but it is pretty good and efficient. You can expect a return on investment very early, and it definitely saved time and manpower.

It is a very good tool to use, and it has a very good costing structure.

We did not choose any other options. We directly chose SUSE Rancher.

Around ninety-five to ninety-eight percentage of reliability can be expected. We are only using the tool, and we do not have any other relationships. I would give SUSE Rancher a rating of nine out of ten.

We have two use cases for a number of customers with SUSE Rancher. One is where we manage and maintain the life cycle of a sizable Kubernetes environment across DevOps environments in AWS, where SUSE Rancher in this case manages the entire life cycle. The other use case is where we manage and maintain a set of on-premise capacity environments using SUSE Rancher that we also run in the cloud, and that is somewhat different.

We have deployed those clusters using SUSE Rancher, having set up virtualization environments on-premise, and then we have the cloud SUSE Rancher set up in AWS, where we used SUSE Rancher to build up the Kubernetes clusters and the services required to then run customer workloads.

There are a number of valuable features and functions that make SUSE Rancher really useful, such as recently scraping the environments looking for places where certificates might have been used, so SUSE Rancher keeps track of those. We have managed, organized, and shared access to the Kubernetes environments and a high level of observability, including views for our end users, the developer partners, and our own admin staff to the same environments. Each of the stakeholders can have a view of what is going on in the environments, get an understanding of the capacity, and also the actions provided that there is something that they need to do themselves. We use SUSE Rancher features and functions that allow us to have policy-based access to the capacity and the services across different organizations, and that has been very useful.

Probably the shared access has been the most valuable because it allowed us to control how the end user gets access, while also having controls over their actions with SUSE Rancher. It allows us to track what they do in the environment. We have been able to allow them ownership of certain use cases, and we also share the kubeconfigs via SUSE Rancher, effectively separating the access of the third-party developers from the actual clusters. That provided us with the ability that if something happened between our customer and those developers, we could deny them access to the actual Kubernetes capacity, which has been very useful.

Certain features and functions in SUSE Rancher have been useful, allowing us to delegate certain features and functions in good agreement with the customer. It is very useful to have that single pane of glass view to the capacity and the systems that we maintain, and of course, the control of access. SUSE makes it very easy to manage some of these functions and functionalities that might be more complex in other ways. It also allows more junior workers to work with Kubernetes capacity and provide maintenance and support for the end customer.

There are areas where more senior developers would appreciate better documentation about the way SUSE Rancher works in controlling the clusters that it manages and maintains. I think SUSE Rancher could do better in documenting and letting the senior developer know what the tasks are and what SUSE Rancher actually does when it does those maintenance tasks. Better auditability would be helpful.

All the tasks that SUSE Rancher does can be done in alternative methods, so it is not a must-have or a necessary tool in my view. The open-source project has been very useful in starting applications, but it has a cost, and when that cost gets measured against the work and the time spent by workforce, the actual usefulness comes when there is quite a lot of capacity before the total cost of ownership becomes positive.

Our business has been using SUSE Rancher for approximately four years now, and we have plenty of experience in other SUSE technologies. SUSE Rancher was the obvious choice for us when we started looking at container management.

SUSE Rancher has not presented any stability issues.

SUSE Rancher is very scalable.

Support has always worked very well, and we have good experience with support.

We evaluated Mirantis solutions, Red Hat OpenShift, and some open-source methods before choosing SUSE Rancher.

It is important to make careful architectural planning prior to deploying SUSE Rancher so that the considerations in how SUSE Rancher manages capacity and clusters can be considered. The deployment planning is important.

We are a partner and a reseller.

We have been able to cut down the amount of time an expert needs to spend on upgrade and maintenance to a fifth of what it was before. The reason is that we have been able to document and manage the upgrade life cycle via SUSE Rancher and then delegate that work to a more junior colleague when they got started with their work, which has allowed us to free the time to more complicated tasks from the senior Kubernetes developers.

Licensing has become quite straightforward, and SUSE has significantly improved on licensing as well, but there still is a threshold before a paid SUSE Rancher becomes useful.

Alternate solutions to SUSE Rancher are available.

SUSE Rancher provides reliable output, but that output always has to be checked and tested by a human. I would rate this product a seven out of ten.

My main use case for SUSE Rancher is managing multi-clusters, such as Kubernetes platform-based Kubernetes, GKE, AKS, and EKS. That was the main purpose.

For managing those clusters with SUSE Rancher, let's say my client is looking for a deployment which needs to be tested on physical VMs just for checking, probably a development scenario. For dev, from SUSE Rancher itself, I can simply select a development scenario and it goes to that particular cluster. I can push that to prod easily using SUSE Rancher itself in a single dashboard from a single location.

As the main use case with SUSE Rancher, I do not have anything else to add.

The best features that SUSE Rancher offers, as I said, one is that it is basically Kubernetes agnostic. When I say Kubernetes agnostic, I mean multi-cluster scenario. I can not only manage on-prem, I can manage public edge at a time, public cloud-based, and private cloud-based, using a UI and CLI. That's the first feature which is more promising for me. The second feature is that it has inbuilt RKE and inbuilt K3s, which is a lightweight Kubernetes for edge cases. These are more logical features.

I would like to add that one of the most logical integrations with SUSE Rancher is CI/CD in terms of dealing with continuous integration and continuous delivery. It supports plugins, LDAP, and IDM, and we can easily integrate LDAP and IDM with the RBAC. That's another feature.

SUSE Rancher has positively impacted my organization with increased efficiency in a 10x manner. Earlier we were using kubectl and config files for switching the context, for switching the cluster, and for switching namespaces, which presented lot of difficulties. But after adopting SUSE Rancher and SUSE Rancher Prime, specifically SUSE Rancher Prime, which is a single dashboard ecosystem, efficiency increased significantly.

I think SUSE Rancher can be improved, particularly because SUSE Manager, SUSE Rancher Manager, or SUSE Rancher Prime runs on containers. I wish the container could be more lightweight so that anyone can test and verify SUSE Rancher Prime. The image could be lighter.

I would not like to add more about needed improvements for SUSE Rancher as of now. I think I covered almost all regarding SUSE Rancher improvements.

I have been working in my current field for 25 years.

SUSE Rancher is stable in my experience.

SUSE Rancher's scalability is good. It runs on RKE in the backend, so autoscaling is one of the best features. It uses HPA in the backend, so horizontal pod autoscaling is by default inherited in SUSE Rancher.

Regarding customer support with SUSE Rancher, as of now, I did not get any use case of dealing with customer support. Most of the things are well documented, so we do not need to raise any ticket so far.

I did not previously use a different solution before SUSE Rancher. We started with SUSE Rancher Manager itself and did not use any other solution.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for SUSE Rancher is quite good. Pricing is nice and I would say it is acceptable. It is easy to set up in terms of experience.

I have seen a return on investment from using SUSE Rancher in terms of time and employee resources. For example, rather than dealing with three employees, after implementing SUSE Rancher Manager, we are able to do it with a single employee, which ultimately saves the cost.

Before choosing SUSE Rancher, I did not evaluate other options. We found SUSE Rancher Manager was one of the best options, and we did not compare other solutions.

The advice I would give to others looking into using SUSE Rancher is to try it. They have a lot of pricing models that are very feasible. You can set up a demo and try to get into different scenarios. Try to check the features of it.

My company does not have a business relationship with the vendor other than being a customer. We are just a customer and not a partner or reseller.

I have no additional thoughts about SUSE Rancher so far before we wrap up. I would rate this review an 8 overall.

In my day-to-day work, I leverage the centralized administration by providing the development teams with a graphical interface, eliminating the need to use Kubernetes command line for deployments and monitoring. Having a web interface is very useful for them.

I find metrics visualization to be particularly useful within that management.

Regarding metrics visualization and cluster administration, SUSE Rancher provides very easy-to-follow instructions for managing the different clusters that are not created directly with SUSE Rancher.

SUSE Rancher has positively impacted my organization by making the teams' work easier and reducing project delivery time.

I have noticed a reduction in delivery time with metrics showing approximately a 30% reduction in time when compared to not having an administration panel.

Regarding the improvements needed, the graphical interface does some unusual things and it could be refined.

I found this interview comprehensive and appropriate, and everything seems correct. I have no additional comments about SUSE Rancher before we end the interview.

I would rate this review as an eight overall.

Our main use case for SUSE Rancher is for Kubernetes as a Service for our cloud product. We have also used SUSE Rancher for managing our Container as a Service and Kubernetes as a Service product.

As a cloud provider, we use our own cloud portal to provide specific cloud services to our customers. Customers can log in to the portal and if they would like to have Kubernetes as a Service, they purchase the Kubernetes product from our portal. The portal communicates with SUSE Rancher Management to provision the code to install the Rancher Management on top of our VMs and then deploy the Kubernetes automatically.

We also use SUSE Rancher for the management of our existing cluster for Kubernetes.

The best features SUSE Rancher offers are automation and observability or monitoring. These two are the main concerns for using the Rancher Management product.

The automation and observability features have helped our team by expediting our provisioning because this is a self-service portal, and we certainly need automation to do the orchestration and provisioning of the cluster. SUSE Rancher has been helpful for us in that matter. Regarding the observability, since we are a Kubernetes cluster, if something happens with the Kubernetes cluster, we get the notification and it helps us to do proactive monitoring and troubleshooting.

SUSE Rancher has positively impacted our organization by giving us the capability to offer Kubernetes as a Service to our customers.

It would be beneficial to have more support for the product.

I have been working in my current field for almost 15 years.

SUSE Rancher is stable.

SUSE Rancher's scalability is good. It could scale significantly.

Customer support is adequate with no problems.

We previously used OpenStack Kubernetes and manual Kubernetes installation from upstream. We switched because it is easier to use SUSE Rancher because of the automation.

SUSE Rancher has positively impacted our organization by giving us the capability to offer Kubernetes as a Service to our customers.

I don't have the exact number, but I could say that with SUSE Rancher, we've managed to cut the provisioning time to probably one-tenth of the usual provisioning time. Since it is an automation tool, I believe that it will be much better for the number. For cost reduction, we save a lot on manpower; instead of hiring a 24/7 team to do the provisioning, we could just hire a couple of teams to monitor SUSE Rancher Management to do the provisioning. For customer satisfaction, because it is very fast, it will be improved significantly.

Currently, I am using the community version, so there is no licensing cost. We are currently considering using the support license for SUSE Rancher because we are a SUSE partner.

We evaluated OpenShift.

I would suggest SUSE Rancher for its ease of use, automation, and stability. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for SUSE Rancher is to manage the cluster in the GUI instead of looking at the master nodes.

I use SUSE Rancher to monitor all health checks for a Kubernetes cluster, including nodes, pods, and failed jobs. I also use it for Prometheus rules that I define from time to time in the SUSE Rancher GUI. This is my daily task.

I handle the basic components for the cluster there and I check the logs for each pod and each node. All of my troubleshooting is performed in the SUSE Rancher GUI.

The best features SUSE Rancher offers include utilizations for each node and pod, and all of them are useful for monitoring the health check for clusters I manage.

These features help me in my work by making it easier to obtain information about our cluster health checks before errors occur. This allows us to address issues earlier.

SUSE Rancher has impacted my organization positively by enabling us to identify issues before they happen through monitoring utilizations and node pressure.

I have noticed that SUSE Rancher's GUI is slow because we have more than 1,000 pods, and when searching for a pod name, the page takes some time to load.

Everything else is working well for me, so I do not have additional improvements to suggest.

I did not use any other solutions before SUSE Rancher.

SUSE Rancher is stable, and I have used it for monitoring my Kubernetes cluster.

SUSE Rancher's scalability is working with high performance, and it can handle growth and additional clusters easily based on my experience.

SUSE Rancher's customer support is performing well and providing very good support.

I did not use any other solutions before SUSE Rancher.

I have seen a return on investment with SUSE Rancher, as it can save time and allows for fewer employees.

I do not know about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing information because another segment is responsible for this.

SUSE Rancher has made things easier for my team and organization by reducing errors, as I use it every day of the week, and it shows us issues through dashboards. I would rate this product a 10.

SUSE Rancher's main use case in my company involves working with Kubernetes. SUSE Rancher helps me manage and automate processes with Kubernetes through full integration from hardware to application. It is my main tool for working with infrastructure, and I have been working exclusively with it for the last ten years.

The best features of SUSE Rancher that I would highlight include being open source and the ability to extend the application with my own modules if needed, such as Docker Machine drivers.

The openness of the platform and the ability to create my own extensions is very important to me. I have implemented unique solutions for my tasks using this capability.

Regarding the platform's features and advantages, it is unfortunate that observability and some artificial intelligence functionality work fully only with a paid subscription. Otherwise, everything is excellent.

There are still some small details and functions I would like to see in the future, such as more UI extensions for operators.

Regarding the convenience of working with the current SUSE Rancher interface, I would appreciate a more flexible mobile version of the application.

I have been using SUSE Rancher for approximately ten years, possibly longer.

I utilize the whole line of SUSE Rancher products: Longhorn storage, built-in monitoring, Harvester, K3s, and RKE2. In general, it is the complete package from hardware to developers' code. My overall review rating for SUSE Rancher is nine out of ten.

My main use case for SUSE Rancher is diagnosing issues that are currently on Docker images, so I use it for testing, providing support, and checking usual logics of the product. A specific example of a recent task where I used SUSE Rancher to diagnose or support something is that we currently have a series of microservices, and we frequently use one to check customer issues. We daily use SUSE Rancher to run our Docker images.

In my experience, the best features SUSE Rancher offers are that it is very easy to use compared to Docker, it is lightweight, faster, and it instantly integrates our system's infrastructure without doing any major configuration changes, so it is really easy to work with.

The ease of use and instant integration of SUSE Rancher have helped our team because when we introduce this to new team members, it just works really easily. We can give instructions to a new team member, and they can follow the steps and instantly get started working on their code. We just ask them to get the images and run it, so it is that easy to run.

What stands out most about SUSE Rancher for me is the ease of use compared to Docker, as it is easy, fast enough, and not laggy, making those the key features that I appreciate.

SUSE Rancher has positively impacted our organization by helping our teams achieve greater results in delivering end-to-end initiatives. It helps us test much more easily with the images, and we can integrate them into our space. When we are testing, we have to work with different components, and we can easily test other components and see how integration works.

An improvement I wish for with SUSE Rancher is that we once had issues regarding some driver problems for the network on a particular laptop, and we had a hard time finding the exact error occurring. It seems to have something to do with Microsoft VM, but from the errors that SUSE Rancher shows, it is difficult to find the root cause of what happened, so it would be really useful if I could view the errors and get a cleaner root cause of what happened.

I have been using SUSE Rancher for around two years now.

In my experience, SUSE Rancher is stable.

The scalability of SUSE Rancher is pretty good, and I have had no issues.

I have not needed to reach out to customer support, as I have not had any occurrences requiring me to contact them.

Before SUSE Rancher, we used Docker, but we moved to SUSE Rancher because of some licensing issues.

My primary use case for SUSE Rancher is managing Kubernetes clusters, allocating them to different users, and monitoring workloads. I manage all cluster-related activities through Rancher.

The most valuable features of SUSE Rancher include the user interface and the display features. The interface allows me to access basic usage and cloud statistics without needing to run commands.

I believe additional features for a paid solution should be included, such as more detailed insights, better graphics, and an improved user interface.

I have been using Rancher for almost one year.

The product has been stable over the last year.

Previously, I used solutions like Kubeflow and others. For SUSE, Rancher seems to be the best option. It offers support which the other open-source solutions do not, even though they have more features.

For basic usage, I would recommend SUSE Rancher. The other solution provides more features but lacks support. There is a trade-off based on how many resources you have to manage these tools. 

I would rate the solution six out of ten.