SUSE Product Announcement

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 3 (SP3), SUSE Manager 4.2

SUSE is pleased to announce the availability of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 3 (SP3) and SUSE Manager 4.2 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 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. Using a zypper command leverages the SUSE Customer Center to search across all SUSE repositories available for your product.
• Integrated 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 3 (SP3) product family includes the following products and extensions:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM Z and LinuxONE 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM POWER 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on Arm 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching 15 SP3
• SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP3

Product Information

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Service Pack 3

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 is designed to help organizations to 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 implementations and multi cloud environment, so you can run workloads anywhere. When it comes to running all your workloads, one size Linux OS does not fit all. That’s why we offer the industry-leading adaptable Linux operating system. No matter what your workload requirements (performance, reliability, operating environment), we have an OS solution purpose-built for your needs.

Product News

• Easier migration from openSUSE Leap – common code base
• Enablement of the latest hardware platforms and features (Intel, AMD)
• Linux Kernel 5.3.18
• Many packages updated for FIPS 140-2 compliance
• Database performance improvements for PostgreSQL 13 and MariaDB 10.5
• Increased developer productivity with GCC compiler updated to v10, Python 3.9 and NodeJS14 optimizations
• Increased interoperability with Windows w/support for ex-FAT partition & filesystem

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

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 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 3

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is uniquely designed to deliver improved SAP system availability, reduced risk of SAP system downtime by e.g. automation and tooling, as well as deploy new SAP systems faster on premise and in the cloud. It builds on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a fast, reliable and secure Linux operating system, plus the following benefits for SAP workloads:

• Ensure maximum system availability through full high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) solutions certified by SAP.
• Strengthen deployment and operation of SAP workloads 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, SAP monitoring features, productivity aids for transitioning to SAP S/4HANA and superior support.

Product News

• Reduce the complexity of setting up high availability (HA) for SAP NetWeaver and SAP HANA
• Updates and fixes to automated deployment of SAP workloads, including HA
• Initial versions of Pre-production test for high availability configuration
• Support of additional SAP HANA and NetWeaver high availability scenarios, e.g.
• SAP HANA scale-out multi-target high availability scenarios
• SAP NetWeaver simplified mount structure
• Major saptune update, including server and cloud platform-specific and conditional SAP notes, sysctl check and system validation against SAP notes
• Enhancements and fixes to platform monitoring introduced in SP2, including SAP HANA metrics and system log aggregation

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

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP3 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 3 (SP3)

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

• Simplification of HA setup and support in public cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP)
• SAP High Availability Configuration Check (part of the console)
• Additional tooling for setting up clusters (Pre-production checking)
• HA cluster support across x86-64, s390x, ppc64le, aarch64, Azure, AWS, and GCP
• Validated OCFS2, Cluster-MD, Fencing, DRBD, LVMLOCKD, Hawk on SLES 15 SP3
• Integration with SUSE Manager to view cluster status

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

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP3 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 www.suse.com/products/highavailability/.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop & SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension 15 Service Pack 3 (SP3)

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 Extension 15 SP3 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 SP3
• 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.

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

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.

Product News

• Improvements of connectivity (WiFi, Bluetooth)
• Remote Desktop Experience enhancements
• Improved interoperability with LibreOffice 7.1 Mozilla Thunderbird 78.10 and other updates

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP3 and the Workstation Extension 15 SP3 are available on the x86-64 architecture.

Further Information

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

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 Service Pack 3 (SP3)

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP3 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 SP3. 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

• Upgraded HPC tools
• New NVIDIA Compute Module adds the NVIDIA CUDA network repository for GPU accelerator support
• New NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) support for NVIDIA driver version 11.x

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

Availability

SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 SP3 is available on the x86-64 and AArch64 architecture.

Further Information

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

SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching 15 Service Pack 3 (SP3)

Live Patching is a cutting-edge technology that improves business continuity and saves costs by reducing downtimes, increasing service availability and enhancing security and compliance.

Using Live Patching, you can apply patches to your Linux kernel without rebooting your system. Your applications keep running while you patch the Linux kernel for critical updates.

Live Patching is independent of the application running on the Linux kernel. So, you can keep running any of your business-critical applications ranging from enterprise Artificial Intelligence apps, big data analytics, databases (Oracle, SQL, etc.) to performance demanding in-memory database applications such as SAP HANA.

Linux kernel fixes are distributed as signed RPMs via repository update supporting existing deployment methods including, but not limited to, YaST, Zypper, SMT/RMT and SUSE Manager.

Product News

• Available on multiple architectures – x86-64, IBM Z, IBM POWER
• Compiled from regular source code files, the patch allows simple kernel compilation and linking, making it easy for IT to read and audit
• Integrated into SUSE Manager

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

Availability

Live Patching fixes are available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 and any maintained Linux kernels released within the last 12 months.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching 15 SP3 is available for x86-64, ppc64le (IBM Power) and s390x (IBM Z) systems.

Further Information

For detailed information on SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, please visit www.suse.com/products/live-patching/.

Long Term Service Pack Support for 15 SP2

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 third service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, LTSS for the 15 SP2 version will be available about six months after SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP3 ships.

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

SUSE Manager 4.2

The SUSE Manager 4.2 family includes the following products:

• SUSE Manager Server 4.2
• SUSE Manager Proxy 4.2
• SUSE Manager Retail Branch Server 4.2

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. As a key component of a Hybrid Cloud IT infrastructure, SUSE Manager for 4.2 delivers new or enhanced capabilities to your Edge, Cloud & Datacenter environments.

Key features across all SUSE Manager products include:

• SUSE Manager 4.2 supports all major enterprise Linux operating systems: SUSE Linux Enterprise, Red Hat Linux Enterprise, Ubuntu Linux LTS, Oracle Linux,CentOS, Debian, and now Amazon Linux 2 and Alma Linux 8.
• SUSE Manager 4.2 now integrates Ansible Core in SUSE Manager’s automation environment [TECH PREVIEW]: SUSE Manager 4.2 provides support for Ansible Core packages on SLE and connects to the Ansible control nodes on any supported client operating system to gather inventory, playbooks and manage clients with SUSE Manager. This allows you to simply re-use and run your Ansible playbooks, saving time and resources by consolidating tools while keeping existing automation investments.
• SUSE Manager 4.2 now provides OpenSCAP content for SLE and other supported Linux Operating Systems,
• SUSE Manager 4.2 enhances its patch management functionality to help customers streamline the use of Live Patching: Customers can now easily identify when a live kernel is approaching the end of life and define a corrective action, all from the UI.
• SUSE Manager 4.2 supports Virtual Machine Tuning: default configuration settings may not be the best for VM performance. To ensure best performance proper VM configuration is needed. With SUSE Manager 4.2 customer can easily configure VMs (for example according to SAP best practices) through the UI. Tuning parameters will include CPU pinning and memory settings to name but a few.
• SUSE Manager 4.2 comes with numerous usability improvements: the SUSE Manager WebUI now provides a clear and direct way of knowing exactly where your configuration states and channels are coming from and easily assign them, find all your systems in the SUSE Customer Center with Client list forwarding to SCC, and Other improvements such as better user interface components, configuring commonly-used parameters and enhanced filter lists.
• SUSE Manager 4.2 now enables changing the repository where a package comes from with a simple product migration. This allows you to easily migrate your system from openSUSE Leap to the respective SLES version in just a few clicks.
• SUSE Manager 4.2 provides support for SLE Micro 5.0 clients [TECH PREVIEW]
• SUSE Manager 4.2 now supports Prometheus TLS and basic authentication for HTTP end-points, providing a way to securely transfer metric dataSUSE Manager for Retail 4.2 can build SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service Client (SLEPOS) 15 SP 3 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 3 images for 7.5 years.
• SUSE Manager for Retail 4.2 now supports the 64-bit ARM aarch64 architecture for SLEPOS clients

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

Product News

• Ansible integration into a SUSE Manager automation environment
• Enhanced patch management
• Enhanced tuning for virtualized environment
• Expanded OS support with Amazon Linux 2 and Alma Linux 8
• Modernized POS environment with pre-defined SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service Client 15 SP3 build template
• Support for Arm-based POS devices
• Advanced offline operation using SUSE Manager Hub
• Branch server offline deployment

Availability

SUSE Manager Server 4.2 is available on the x86-64, ppc64le, and S390x hardware architectures.

SUSE Manager Proxy 4.2 and SUSE Manager Retail Branch Server 4.2 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 Cloud Services price list.

For further information

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