SUSE Manager 4.1 Public Release Candidate 1! | SUSE Communities

SUSE Manager 4.1 Public Release Candidate 1!

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We are thrilled to announce SUSE Manager 4.1 Public Release Candidate 1

As usual, we have prepared tons of updates and we hope you will like it.

We also now have a new Public Mailing List, so you can share your feedback with our Public Beta Community, our Engineering and our Product Managers.

Requirements and Beta Registration Codes

SLES 15 SP2 Public Beta is required as base OS, you can retreive it from here.
You will need at least 8 GB of main memory and 100GB of disk space to install the Server and 4 GB of main memory and 100GB of disk space to install the Proxy.

Registration is not working with your regular SUSE Manager key, special Beta Registration Code is required!
You need to request one via email to beta-programs@lists.suse.com.

You only need SUSE Manager 4.1 Beta registration codes for the purpose of installing the SUSE Manager 4.0 Server, Proxy and Retail. No SUSE Linux Enterprise Server registration code is needed.

Changes since SUSE Manager 4.0

SUSE Manager 4.1 Beta is based on SLES 15 SP2 Beta! For more details on SLES 15 SP2 Beta, please visit the dedicated sle-beta Web page.

If you are looking for the complete list of changes since SUSE Manager 4.0, please check out our Release Notes.

Changes since Beta 3

New products enabled

  • openSUSE Leap 15.2,
  • CentOS 6, 7, and 8,
    Starting with SUSE Manager 4.1, CentOS is supported as a client and shows in the product tree in the WebUI. If you were using CentOS via spacewalk-common-channels, you will need to delete your existing channels, synchronize the channel information from SCC, and reassign the channels to the clients.
  • Oracle Linux 6, 7 and 8,
    Starting with SUSE Manager 4.1, Oracle Linux is supported as a client and shows in the product tree in the WebUI.
  • Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

New SUSE branding

The SUSE Manager 4.1 WebUI and documentation have been refreshed with the new SUSE branding guidelines, as published in the SUSE Brand website and SUSE EOS Design System. The new theme is lighter and gives a bit more of free space between elements for better readability.

New documentation

  • A new section on how to configure Salt for GitFS to achieve GitOps has now been added to the Salt Guide,
  • In-place automatic upgrade of SUSE Linux Enterprise clients is now documented, with a sample AutoYaST profile,
  • Example SSO implementation with Keycloak.

Cluster Management

SUSE Manager 4.1 implements cluster management of SUSE CaaS Platform clusters. The following actions are currently supported:

  • Register an existing cluster to SUSE Manager,
  • Add or remove node to the cluster,
  • Promote SLES system to managing node,
  • Update cluster as a whole: SUSE Manager works hand-in-hand with CaaSP to make sure draining, updates, reboots, etc are done properly.

Deployment of CaaSP clusters from scratch will be supported in an upcoming version of SUSE Manager.

Monitoring enhancements

Grafana has been updated to version 7.0.3 and Prometheus to version 2.18.

Performance improvements

  • Reposync,
    Repository syncing has been optimized to perform in less time with respect to past versions. The performance improvement could be up to 6 times faster, depending on the hardware setup (specifically CPUs and network bandwidth) and number of packages.
  • Content Lifecycle Magement,
    Content Lifecycle Management has been optimized, with basic operations (build, promotion) up to two orders of magnitude faster and a quicker UI loading in installations with many channels and organizations.
  • Prometheus Service Discovery.
    Thanks to a number of enhancements and optimizations, Prometheus Service Discovery is now 10 times faster, on average, than it was in SUSE Manager 4.0.

Usability

  • Third-party GPG keys now included,
    Enabling verification of non-SUSE product metadata used to require manual acceptance, and sometimes even manual installation, of the third-party keys for products available from the product tree. Alternatively, an option to not verify the GPG key signature was there.
    In addition to SUSE’s, SUSE Manager 4.1 now includes the GPG keys used to sign packages and/or metadata by other vendors whose products are available in the product tree in the WebUI:
  • openSUSE,
  • CentOS,
  • Oracle Linux,
  • Ubuntu,
  • MicroFocus Open Enterprise Server.

Manual acceptance of those keys is no longer required for GPG signature verification for those products to work. Manual acceptance of GPG keys for any other product or repository is still required for security reasons.

  • Service Pack migration: remember settings,
    A common source of errors in Service Pack Migrations is the human factor: a complex migration is carefully crafted, dry-run to a success, only to mysteriously fail in production. More often than not, the reason for this is when re-creating the migration for production, some step was forgotten.
    In SUSE Manager 4.1, the Service Pack Migration feature has gained memory: you can now re-run successful dry-runs. This is especially useful when you have configured a complex migration, tested it successfully, and would like to make sure it runs in production with exactly the same settings it was designed to run with. To do this, go to the System Event History of the Dry-run action. There is a button “Run migration” which lets you execute the Service Package Migration.

 

Dropped features: Unpublished patches

The Unpublished Patches feature has been dropped in SUSE Manager 4.1.0.
This was a very old feature which originated more than 15 years ago when Spacewalk was used internally by vendors to manage patches before making them available to their customers. This functionality has been superseded a long (more than 10 years) time ago by other features in Uyuni for sysadmins, and by tools such as the Open Build Service for operating system vendors.
After a consultation period with users both in the upstream Uyuni community and the SUSE Manager community, we received no feedback against the removal and executed on it. This will help us realize even further performance improvements in several areas, including the commonly-used Content Lifecycle Management build and promotion operations.
If you still have any unpublished patches, make sure you publish them with SUSE Manager 4.0 before migrating to SUSE Manager 4.1.

And more

Please check out our Release Notes for the complete list of changes.

More information

We are thankful for your support in trying out our beta products and we welcome your feedback.
Do not hesitate to contact us at beta-programs@lists.suse.com if you have any questions.

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