SUSE Linux Enterprise Reviews

My colleagues and I have been using the product for several years now. Overall, I have been very satisfied with it and the way it has integrated into many of the solutions that we have placed in service. SLES is a mature, solid Linux offering. I recommend that companies, which have not reviewed its potential, take a second look.

My experience with SLES extends for at least eight years.

The organization was using an Oracle database and application server, and the Orarun package made deploying those products so easy. It even allowed us to move most of the Oracle software configuration effort away from us to DBAs and application support personnel. 

I do not know if YaST or Orarun made the most impact in our organization. Both made life a lot easier. YaST just made administration a breeze.

The best experience would have to be the upgrade process. It has progressed to be very easy and seamless. 

The most valuable aspect of the product was the support for the Oracle product stack. The Orarun package was such a tremendous help in our shop.

When working in a Department of Defense environment, Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) have to be followed. SLES is not really addressed directly here. It did make following security policy difficult. Red Hat is more friendly in this respect.

I do not recall any stability issues up until Hyper-V was added to the mix. I am not really sure it should be counted because we were not privy to the underlying configuration, and there were other VMs experiencing similar behavior.

With respect to scalability, there have never been any issues. The product was always able to perform the way we needed it to. The SDK and HA software extensions really helped to make many of our solutions possible.

Unfortunately, I have not been overly impressed with their technical support, except on one occasion. I was completely blown out of the water by the outcome of ticket I opened on setting up an IMAP server. The support rep assisted me and drafted a document that would be published for others to benefit from.

My organization moved from Solaris and HP-UX to SLES. These vendors' OEM hardware became too expensive and we were looking for an alternative. 

SLES proved to be a very extendable product, supporting most, if not all of our infrastructure. The major reason I chose to use the product was the extensive enterprise peripheral support. Out-of-the-box SLES supported all of our HBAs and hardware specific components. This was really what sold me.

It also was very easy to setup, and offered an easy to use advanced setup option as well. This helped to create special configurations for different use cases.

As far as licensing goes, there is nothing unusual here. The price and model have worked fine for my organization

Any company looking to standardize on a Linux platform should seriously review this product. It has served me well for many years.

I have been using SUSE and OpenSUSE since 1999 in various capacities.

There are several items which make this distribution a good product, however I think YaST is probably what I like most about it. YaST simplifies the server management of SUSE allowing for a centralized utility to control most of the server functions.

All distributions of Linux could use some improvement. 

The only stability issues that I can recall encountering with SUSE would be with KDE. However, that is limited to just the desktop environment as I have not had stability issues with most server functions.

Not that I can recall.

I have never actually used the technical support. If I had an issue, then I would search the forums to find others that may have encountered similar issues.

I have used various different distributions of Linux. Currently, I am supporting Ubuntu and CentOS server deployments.

The initial setup for most modern Linux distributions is normally straightforward. Most of the common distributions use an ncurses or GUI install. 

I would advise others to download the free or strictly open source versions, then test them in their environment before committing to a purchase. This will allow for testing suitability for applications that they want to run. 

I have evaluated several different versions of Linux distributions over the years. It depends upon the planned use as to which platform will work best. I have tested RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, Linux Mint, SparkyLinux, SliTaz, Gentoo Linux, and several others.

Verify this product will do want you need it to do. As with all server class distributions, it can be setup with or without the GUI.

SuSe has an offline repository in DVD media. It's easy to use, although not as easy as Ubuntu is.

The administration tools are very useful.

We use it as a webserver: DNS Server and LDAP server.

The updating package:

We had trouble installing packages outside of the repository.
There were often conflicts in the existing version;

A depends on B, B depends on C, and etc...so we must upgrade to C and B before installing A.

Since 2010.

So far the use is very stable and we've never experienced any constraints.

No.

We do not pay for a subscription, so we do not get support. But out there, there are a lot of forums that can help us to solve the problem.

Previously, we used Microsoft products. The expensive license fees made us switch to open source.

Compared to Windows, use is more stable and scalable; easy to manage.

Initial setup is straightforward. They have a very good GUI/user interface.

We're not subscribed to any support. So far, without a subscription, there are no obstacles.

We've tried some Linux distro.
Limited internet connection made us look for distros which have repository on DVD.
Ubuntu may be the best choice for beginners if you have reliable internet access.

Look for products that have broad support and community, because it is very helpful when experiencing problems.