What IBM Power Systems users should know about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

I hope by now you’ve heard that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 is generally available. This newest version is designed to bridge traditional IT infrastructure operations with software-defined infrastructure operations. If you missed the June 25^th announcement, you should check out this blog “SUSE Introduces Multimodal OS to Bridge Traditional and Software-Defined Infrastructure”. Two of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 distributions, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for POWER and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, have enhancements that IBM Power Systems users should know about.

For the benefit of those who use a different Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for POWER is our enterprise-grade offering that has specific optimizations for POWER8 and POWER9 processor-based systems. In fact, it was the first Linux enabled to run in POWER9 base mode rather than a compatibility mode. Now when I say it’s optimized for POWER processors, I don’t mean it’s a completely separate distribution. All SUSE Linux Enterprise Server family products are built on a common code base, but each product has unique features to support specific hardware platforms and solutions.

In the case of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for POWER 15, we focused on ways to improve performance and increase flexibility with shared resources. Applications developers can improve performance and diagnostics with POWER9 support of tracing tools, tuning and support for the current GCC. This release also supports SR-IOV IBM vNIC shared adapters with IBM PowerVM as a technical preview. When this feature is fully supported by IBM, you will be able to increase system I/O performance, reduce CPU load and provide the ability to enforce quality of service.

For SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 you can read my blog “EARLY ANNOUNCEMENT: SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 is coming!” to learn about everything that’s new. But I’d like to highlight a couple of key features that are now supported specifically for IBM Power servers. We’ve increased the virtual address space to 512 TB to support very large SAP HANA databases. This will accommodate the huge SAP scale-up systems some of you are building, and reduce the frequency of reboots that may be needed due to memory fragmentation. Relax and Recover (ReaR) is now supported on IBM Power servers. The gives you an open source Disaster Recovery solution with functionality that is similar to the AIX “mksysb” you’re probably already familiar with.

Ready to start evaluating SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 for your IBM Power servers? Go to the download pages for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for POWER 15 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15.

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