SUSE Product Announcement

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 2 (SP2), SUSE Manager 4.1

SUSE is pleased to announce the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and SUSE Manager 4.1 to all customers worldwide.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Information

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 helps simplify your IT environment, modernize IT infrastructure and accelerate innovation with an engaging platform for developers. As a result, you can easily deploy and transition business-critical workloads across on-premise and public cloud environments.

Key features across all SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 products include:

• Common Code Base. All SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 products share code across all architectures. 
• Modular+. With Modular+ architecture, everything is a module. The products are designed as a set of modules.   
• Unified Installer. The new Unified Installer simplifies IT operations. You can install all SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 products using the Unified Installer.   
• Enhanced Package Search. The packaging enhancements are designed to further simplify IT operations. It is easy to find, view, and trace packages across all products, extensions and modules. As a result, you can avoid missed-but-available features, mix and match requirements, and allow compliance checks for packages. The new zypper command ‘zypper search-packages’ leverages the SUSE Customer Center to search across all SUSE repositories available for your product.
• Software Development Kit. The Software Development Kit is now integrated into the products. Development packages are packaged alongside regular packages. The Development Tools module contains the tools needed for development.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 2 (SP2) product family includes the following products and extensions

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension 15 SP2
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP2    

Product Information

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Service Pack 2

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 is designed to help organizations further accelerate innovation, gain competitive advantage and improve productivity. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server simplifies your efforts to run on the cloud. It is built for hybrid implementation and multi cloud environment, so you can run workloads anywhere – physical, virtual, on-prem or cloud.

Product News

• Cloud. Make it easier for organizations to benefit from hyperscalers, with updated cloud images for Alibaba, Azure, AWS, Google, IBM, and Oracle.

• Security. Address the needs of Federal organizations and enterprises running High-Security Environments.

  -IPS 140-2 certification-ready packages. Common Criteria Certification process started (BSI-DSZ-CC-1152).

  -Support for a complete and secure offline installation for air-gapped deployments.

• Business Continuity. Optimize utilization of hardware and improve performance by up to 20%. Remove bottlenecks via enhanced system statistics, providing analysis down to the applications' CPU usage.

• On-prem deployments. Up to a 2x compute scalability increase by enabling the latest hardware generation. Support for latest hardware of AMD EPYC, Intel, Fujitsu A64FX and more.

• Open Source Adoption.

-Support an organization’s entire development environment by easing the migration from the community distribution openSUSE Leap to supported SUSE Linux Enterprise: differences reduced by about 75%. Less risk, less administrative effort.

-Support for PostgreSQL 12 and MariaDB 10.4: new features and performance improvements enable more organizations, to migrate from proprietary traditional databases towards open source.

• DevOps. Meet the quickly changing needs of the modern developer and DevOps teams by supporting automation, project builds and message-oriented middleware, all combined with management and monitoring features (such as RabbitMQ, Prometheus and Maven).

• Localization. Improved support for localization needs with improved Chinese language support for installation and documentation.

• Unified Installer. The Unified Installer is available for both online and offline installations.

• Transactional Updates. SP2 offers a system role for installing a server with transactional updates (under tech preview).

• Packages. The search_packages function allows to search across all available SUSE packages. It is integrated into the standard 'zypper search' command

• Kernel. Kernel is updated to 5.3.18 delivering new hardware enablement and other improvements  

• BTRFS. Simplified layout and improved handling of home directories.   

• Performance Management. Bcache support added to installer and YaST.

• AArch64: Additional Arm processors, servers and Raspberry Pi 4 devices are supported.   

   Please see the release notes at www.suse.com/releasenotes for more details.

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64, AArch64, ppc64le, S390x hardware architectures.

Operating System images, to run as guest on hypervisors, are available for KVM, XEN, Microsoft Hyper-V, OpenStack Cloud, VMware and others.

Further Information

For more detailed information about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, please visit www.suse.com/products/server

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 Service Pack 2

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is uniquely designed to deliver reduced risk from service outages, foster innovation with maintenance automation, and deploy new services faster on premise and in the cloud. It includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a fast, reliable and secure Linux operating system, plus the following benefits for SAP workloads:

• Reduce risk from outages of critical services with a full high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) solution certified by SAP.
• Foster innovation for new service delivery by reducing the complexity of infrastructure management with automation features that enable IT staff to spend less time on routine maintenance.
• Minimize the time and effort to deploy and manage SAP systems with a unified solution that includes automated installation, productivity aids for transitioning to SAP S/4HANA and superior support.
  

Product News

• Ensure compliance with HA/DR requirements to reduce downtime with support for the latest NetWeaver enqueue failover and recovery options.
• Reduce downtime by reducing the time to reload SAP HANA memory data after restarts with support for IBM Power Systems Virtual Persistent Memory (PMEM).
• Proactively identify system issues before failures to reduce the workload for SAP Basis Administrators with server and SAP-specific operational data collection and graphical display, on-premise and in the cloud.
• Improve effectiveness of troubleshooting SAP HANA System Replication with new tooling to visualize and validate cluster decisions and replay transitions.
• Deploy SAP S/4HANA services faster by reducing the time and potential errors with deployment automation that uses Salt-based configuration scripts and Terraform deployment to quickly set up a full SAP software stack, for single node and clustered configurations.   

    Please see the release notes at www.suse.com/releasenotes for more details.

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64 and ppc64le hardware architectures.

Further Information

For more detailed information about SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, please visit www.suse.com/products/sles-for-sap

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension is an industry-leading, open source, high availability clustering system designed to virtually eliminate unplanned downtime, be easy to use and be deployed in both physical and virtual environments. Also included is Geo Clustering for SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, which is designed to manage cluster servers in data centers anywhere in the world. High availability clustering helps to minimize data loss due to corruption or failure by protecting your data assets using your existing IT infrastructure.

High availability clustering is used to automate application and data recovery. You can use our flexible, policy-driven clustering solution to implement highly available Linux clusters and eliminate single points of failure. Your servers are continuously monitored, and when a fault or failure occurs, the workload is transferred from one server to another, or the application is automatically restarted on a known working system. This helps you maintain business continuity and minimize unplanned downtime.

Product News

• In earlier versions of the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability extension, a simplified two-node cluster configuration was supported via a technical preview feature. In SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP2 the new Quorum (qdevice/qnetd) device moves to fully supported status.

Please see the release notes at www.suse.com/releasenotes for more details.

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64, s390x (IBM Z) and ppc64le (IBM Power systems) hardware architectures.

Further Information

For more detailed information about SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension, please visit https://www.suse.com/products/highavailability/

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop & SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension 15 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is a complete desktop solution that provides office productivity, web, collaboration, and development capabilities. With SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension, enterprises can lower costs and maximize productivity, while maintaining interoperability with other operating systems and their specific data formats. This full-featured enterprise desktop operating system is designed for mixed IT environments. It offers best of breed performance with reduced risk of technological obsolescence or vendor lock-in and is supported by the world-class SUSE services team and its broad ecosystem of partners.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop / Workstation 15 SP2 delivers

• The only truly integrated local systems management stack on Linux: for interactive use (YaST), scripting (AutoYaST) and integration into multi machine systems management environments such as SUSE Manager.   
• Robustness on administrative errors and improved management capabilities with full system rollback.  
• A fully supported in place upgrade from SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 to SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2.   
• A modern desktop environment with GNOME 3, optimized and adapted with an additional mode allowing for easier migration from earlier versions.   

SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation provides desktop functionality to developers and helps partners to create virtual desktop infrastructures.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop provides market-leading usability and seamless interoperability with existing IT systems.

Deployment Options

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is targeting single instance physical deployments.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation extension combines all SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop features into one workstation for developers and admins. SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation may also be used in VDI solutions or to deploy desktops in cloud environments.

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64 architecture.

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP2 is a highly scalable, high performance open source operating system designed to utilize the power of parallel computing for modeling, simulation and advanced analytics workloads.

The convergence of high-performance data-intensive simulation and modeling with data analytics workloads requires a powerful software-defined parallel computing platform. Advanced analytics is being used today in intelligence and scientific communities along with machine learning, and new commercial users rely on analytics for business intelligence, personalized medicine, fraud detection, affinity marketing and more - all fueling the needs for more compute power and scale. Businesses around the world today are recognizing that a high-performance computing infrastructure is vital to supporting the analytics applications of tomorrow.

Deploy High Performance Computing (HPC) environments faster and easier with the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP2. It uses the SUSE Module structure to deliver a selected set of tools and components used in High Performance Computing environments, including the slurm job scheduler. To keep up with the pace of changing customer needs for leading edge HPC support on both hardware and software, this module provides software components that are frequently updated to the latest versions available. Because this module is updated more frequently than is possible for the base operating system, it allows you to keep up with rapidly evolving HPC without changing the base OS and therefore avoid extensive re-testing of your platform.

Product News

• Accelerated innovation with a broad ecosystem of hardware partners (including HPE, Cray, Lenovo, Dell, and Arm) and software partners (including Microsoft, Altair, Bright Computing, Univa and the OpenHPC Community) delivering cohesive HPC stacks for the latest supercomputers.
• Numerous updates to HPC Module packages, including slurm 20.02.1 with support for srun and PMIx
• High scalability and performance by utilizing Linux clustering and the power of parallel computing.   
• Highly efficient offering that runs on a wide range of hardware with enhanced management of HPC workloads.   
• Separate product: As of SLE HPC 15, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 is a separate product from SLES 15. This will allow additional flexibility to deliver tailored configuration specific to an HPC environment, such as installation system roles for Head Nodes, Compute Nodes, and Development Nodes. SLE HPC 15 SP2 is based on SLES 15 SP2 but has a different workload optimization, installation roles, and product key.    
• Migration from SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for HPC 12 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 is supported. Customers migrating from SLES 12 may need to change their product identification by using the switch_sles_sle-hpc script. Please see the release notes for more information.    
• Integrated HPC Module. The HPC Module is built into SLE HPC 15 SP2.  The HPC functionality delivered in the SLE HPC product is not available to customers running SLES 15. Customers with a SLES registration can install SLE HPC 15 with their existing SLES key.
  

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64 and AArch64 architecture.

Long Term Service Pack Support for 15 SP1

Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS) delivers up to 3 years of extended support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications after their end of general support.

Product News

• With the release of the second service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, LTSS for the 15 SP1 version will be available about six months after SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 ships.

SUSE Manager 4.1

The SUSE Manager 4.1 family includes the following products:

• SUSE Manager Server 4.1
• SUSE Manager Proxy 4.1
• SUSE Manager Retail Branch Server 4.1
  

SUSE Manager helps your enterprise DevOps and IT Operations teams reduce complexity and regain control of your IT assets with a single tool to manage Linux systems across a variety of hardware architectures, hypervisors as well as container, IoT and cloud platforms. It automates Linux server and IoT device provisioning, patching and configuration for faster, consistent and repeatable server deployment, helping to optimize operations and reduce costs. With automated monitoring, tracking, auditing and reporting of your systems, VMs, and containers across your development, test and production environments, you can ensure compliance with internal security policies and external regulations.

Key features across all SUSE Manager products include:

• SUSE Manager 4.1 supports all the enterprise Linux operating systems: SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Linux Enterprise, Ubuntu Linux LTS, and now also Oracle Linux and CentOS. RHEL 8 support includes Content Lifecycle Management filters for modular repositories.
• SUSE Manager 4.1 can now manage clusters: register existing cluster, update, patch and reboot in a coordinated way to ensure business continuity. The first supported Cluster is SUSE Container as a Service Platform, with SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE Linux Enterprise HA to follow.
• SUSE Manager 4.1 now allows for recurring highstate scheduling and maintenance windows
• SUSE Manager 4.1 comes with multiple monitoring enhancements, such as bundled Grafana dashboards, pre-configured alerting rules, multi-site/server aggregation through Prometheus federation and a simplified and more secure Salt formula to expose metrics from all Prometheus exporters on a single network port.
• SUSE Manager 4.1 supports Virtual Storage Pools.
• SUSE Manager 4.1 comes with multiple usability improvements, like ssh key based client onboarding, automatic generation of bootstrap repositories and automatic database migration on update
• SUSE Manager 4.1 features numerous performance improvements both big and small, particularly in Reposync, Content Lifecycle Management, and Prometheus Service Discovery.
• SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 can build SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service Client (SLEPOS) 15 SP 2 images. Preconfigured templates are provided to help build these POS images.SUSE will provide support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service Client (SLEPOS) 15 SP 2 images for 7.5 years.
• SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 now supports a remote branch server architecture with the Retail Branch Server either located in the data center or public cloud – ideal for small stores with only a few POS devices
• Leverage POS offline deployments SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 with the ability to create USB images and USB boot.
• SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 supports wireless boot for deployment and maintenance of POS terminals over the store’s WiFi network.
• SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1 supports EFI HTTP booting.     

Please see the release notes at www.suse.com/releasenotes for more details.

Availability

SUSE Manager Server 4.1 is available on the x86-64,ppc64le,and S390x hardware architectures.

SUSE Manager Proxy 4.1 and SUSE Manager Retail Branch Server 4.1 are available on the x86-64 architecture.

Further Information

For more detailed information about SUSE Manager, please visit www.suse.com/products/suse-manager

General Information

Licensing and Support

The open source license minimizes the risk of vendor lock-in and its adherence to open standards encourages interoperability with industry standard tools and technologies.

Active subscriptions for the specific products are required to receive technical support and maintenance.

For more detailed information about licensing, please check www.suse.com/products/terms_and_conditions.pdf

For details on offered support level, please visit www.suse.com/support

Upgrade Details

Customers with a valid subscription and who are using previous versions can upgrade to this most current version at no extra charge. A subscription entitles customers access to any generally available and supported product of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, SUSE Linux Enterprise 12, and SUSE Manager per its product lifecycle.

There are no changes to part numbers or pricing with this announcement.  This announcement applies to the Appliance price list.

For further information

For detailed information on SUSE's support lifecycle, visit https://www.suse.com/support.