---
# source: src/content/solutions/en/igel/igel-ums.md
# route:  /en/solutions/igel/igel-ums/
title: Universal Management Suite
tags: [modern-workplace, endpoint-security, managed-services]
vendors: [igel]
summary: The management server for every IGEL endpoint. Policies, firmware, certificates and apps, applied to one device or ten thousand.
photoNeed: "An IGEL endpoint in place: a UD Pocket in a laptop, or a thin client at a working desk"
stub: false
draft: false
kind: product
acronym: UMS
addon: false
sourceNote: soultec.ch/solutions/igel, read 2026-08-30, for the architecture; kb.igel.com IGEL OS Editions feature matrix, read the same day, for which feature sits at which licence level
vendorName: IGEL Universal Management Suite
status: current
practice: >
  Draft, not yet reviewed. We size the UMS before the endpoints, and the question that decides it is not device count but whether the estate has to survive the server being down. Distributed UMS is a Standard-licence feature and a day-one architecture decision; retrofitting it after two thousand devices are registered is not a config change.
practiceReview: true
---

## What it is

The UMS is the server the endpoints answer to. Configuration, grouping, monitoring,
policies, firmware, certificates, network settings and software packages all come from it,
applied to a single device or to a group. It manages IGEL OS 11 and 12 side by side, which
matters because most estates are mid-migration for longer than they planned.

## Two consoles, on purpose

UMS 12 has a browser-based **Web App** and a Java-based **Console**. The Web App is where
day-to-day work happens; the Console still carries the deeper administrative functions.
Anyone expecting the browser to have replaced the desktop client will be disappointed for a
while yet, and it is better to know that before the rollout plan says otherwise.

## How it talks to the endpoints

Through the **Unified Protocol**, a WebSocket connection that carries everything between
UMS 12 and IGEL OS 12, and only between those two. One consequence is worth the sentence:
because it is a single WebSocket, an external load balancer such as F5 BIG-IP or Citrix
NetScaler can sit in front of it, which is how you get load distribution and availability
in the management layer rather than in a script.

For real high availability there is **Distributed UMS**: several UMS servers on one shared
database.

## What the licence level decides

All IGEL OS Editions include a UMS licence, so the question is never whether you have one.
It is which one. An external database, the IGEL Cloud Gateway and Distributed UMS arrive
with Standard; the distributed app repository and using the UMS as a certificate authority
proxy arrive with Enterprise.

Downgrading takes features away immediately, and IGEL says so in the manual. Nothing is
deleted, so an upgrade restores it, but the afternoon in between is real.