About customers

Many enterprises have consolidated disparate IT operations into a single operation, yet they still need separate reporting, billing, and management for different business units, groups or customers. For example, one company may separate activities for their West Coast Office, East Coast Office, and London Office. A service provider company may organize their IT operations by their customers such as Customer A, Customer B, Customer C and so forth.

SA accommodates these requirements by letting you create separate customers and assign each managed server to a specific customer.

A customer in SA is a logical group into which you can place servers. You can then perform IT management tasks on all servers belonging to a customer. Customers also provide security and authorization boundaries. Each SA user must be given access to one or more customers to gain access to the servers belonging to each customer.

IT resources such as patches and patch policies, software packages and policies can also be assigned to customers. Only resources assigned to a customer can be used on servers assigned to the same customers. Resources assigned to a special category “Customer Independent” can be used on any servers regardless of their customer assignment.

• About customers and facilities
• Predefined customers
• Customer security, authorizations, and permissions
• Permissions to create, delete, and modify customers

About customers and facilities

A facility is all the servers managed by an SA core or satellite. You may have one facility or you many have multiple facilities. Each facility is managed by a separate SA core or satellite. If you have multiple cores and facilities, all your SA cores are connected in a multimaster mesh for reliability, redundancy, scalability and performance. All cores and satellites communicate with each other to keep all your data redundantly stored. If one core goes down, the other cores automatically provide services to the servers managed by that core.

Customers are a way to organize your servers and provide access control boundaries based on the users of your servers. A customer represents a set of servers associated with a business organization, such as a division or a company. Typically a server is associated with a customer because it runs applications for that customer.

You can define as many customers as you need and assign managed servers to each customer. However, you must first associate a customer with one or more facilities before you can place servers from a facility into a customer. A customer can span more than one facility and a facility can contain one or more customers. To associate a customer with one or more facilities, see Viewing or modifying a customer .

Predefined customers

SA defines the following customers:

• Not assigned: Default “customer” that servers belong to when they are not assigned to a “real” customer. When you bring a server into SA, the server is associated with the Not Assigned customer.
• Opsware (customer): SA infrastructure component hosts belonging to the Opsware customer. The Opsware customer is a system-provided customer designation that is used exclusively for servers (or VMs) that host the SA infrastructure: cores, satellites, and slices. This customer designation allows you to give infrastructure servers their own set of access controls to keep them logically separate from your other servers and prevents you from accidently deleting them.
• Opsware Customer can be renamed, but the qualities that belong to the Opsware Customer are carried over to the newly named entity.

• Customer Independent: Resources such as software and patches can be specified as customer independent. Servers cannot be assigned to this “customer”. These customer independent resources can be installed on any managed server, no matter what customer the server is assigned to.

You can install software and patches that are Customer Independent on Not Assigned servers. However, you cannot install any resources associated with a customer on a server that is not assigned to a customer. That is, the resources and servers need to be owned by the same customers.

Customer security, authorizations, and permissions

Setting up separate customers and assigning servers and IT resources to separate customers allows you to set up security boundaries and user authorization capabilities. Only users who have permission to access a customer’s servers and IT resources are authorized to manage those servers and resources. A user who does not have access to a customer’s servers and IT resources can neither see nor manage that customer’s servers.

Access is granted or denied based on user groups. Each user belongs to one or more user groups. Each user group has access to one or more specific customers. This combination of customers and user groups gives you full control over security and authorization.

For more information on users, user groups and setting permissions, see the SA Administer section.

Permissions to create, delete, and modify customers

An SA user must have the Super Administrator permissions to create or delete customers. An SA user must have the Customers Feature permission to modify customers. For more information on permissions, see the SA Administer section.