Support for Deployment Manager ended on 1st October, 2015. Redgate will continue to provide technical support for deploying databases.

About Octopus Deploy

We recommend that users of Deployment Manager upgrade to Octopus Deploy. Octopus Deploy is a feature-rich deployment tool. Its installation process and user interface are very similar to Deployment Manager.

It includes four of the most popular Deployment Manager feature requests: an approval step in deployments, more mature audit functionality, scheduled deployments, and email notifications.

It has a much greater variety of deployment options. It has rich support for configuring web app deployments, role-based deployment (you don't need to specify exact machines to deploy to, just what role of machine), Azure deployments, service deployments, and FTP upload deployments. You can use custom PowerShell scripts that don't have to be included in the NuGet package, and create a library of script modules, step templates, and sets of variable that you can share between projects. It has greater Active Directory support, including the ability to use Active Directory groups. It also has retention policies.

Database deployments

Octopus Deploy doesn't have integrated support for deploying databases in the same way as Deployment Manager, but you can still deploy databases if you have the DLM Automation Suite (previously called the SQL Automation Pack). The main changes are that:

• If you were using the Deployment Manager SSMS add-in, you need to switch to using the DLM Automation Suite to package databases.
• You will need to upgrade to the latest version of Octopus Deploy (version 2.6.1 and above) and enable a new Redgate Database feature for steps that deploy database packages. 
• You can't specify SQL Servers directly as deployment targets in Octopus Deploy; you will need to supply connection details for each SQL Server instance as part of the deployment step or use variables.

For more information about using Octopus Deploy with the DLM Automation suite, see Deploying using SQL Release and Octopus Deploy.

What licenses do I need?

To do database deployments with Octopus Deploy, you will need a license for Octopus Deploy and a single license of the DLM Automation Suite (previously called the SQL Automation Pack). You do not need to install the DLM Automation Suite on each agent.

If you are not doing database deployments, you will only need a license for Octopus Deploy.

Please contact Redgate support for more information on getting a license for Octopus and the DLM Automation Suite.