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.

SUSE Linux Enterprise has a common code base that runs across so many of your architectures (AMD/Intel x86-64, IBM Z, IBM POWER and Arm64), containers and edge devices – providing the same IT experience, security, and stability across that mixed infrastructure, so you can streamline IT skill sets and systems management and simplify support and services.

What’s New in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3

“SUSE continues to drive innovation with Google Cloud in the open-source community.”  Nelly Porter, Google Group Product Manager, Cloud Security

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 and openSUSE Leap 15.3 have arrived – providing the foundation for zero-friction IT operations across environments – from data centers to multi-cloud to edge devices.

Full Binary Compatibility Between openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise

With the release of SLES 15 SP3 we now have 100% binary compatibility with openSUSE Leap 15.3 (our developer platform).  That means that you can smoothly move workloads from development to production environments that run SLE 15 SP3 – and back again – with assured application compatibility.

“Now, our customers can test their workloads using openSUSE Leap and then deploy a fully supported SUSE Linux Enterprise Confidential VM in production thanks to the binary compatibility introduced with SLES 15 SP3. This capability, delivered through strong collaboration with OS partners, makes cloud adoption more cost effective for our customers.”  Nelly Porter, Google Group Product Manager, Cloud Security

This is an important milestone for openSUSE and SUSE, our users and our customers: Leap 15.3 is the first release where openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise share the same source code and use the exact same binary packages. The bottom line is that we are providing a seamless developer experience that drives faster digital transformation. For more information, check out this blog on openSUSE Leap.

Accelerate Cloud Migrations with Open, Secure Containers

The SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images (SLE BCI) open source project builds, delivers and maintains an extended set of container images.  A developer repository provides images consisting of a minimal environment for containers based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.  SUSE Rancher can leverage these images in a truly open and flexible Kubernetes-based platform.  This combination delivers a flexible developer experience that integrates and supports language-native tools.

The goal of the SLE BCI project is to provide a flexible developer experience that accounts, integrates with, and supports language native (Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.) tools and workflows. SLE BCI is a self-contained environment targeting a specific version of any given programming language ecosystem to facilitate software development, testing and deployment. Along with the simple and secure SLE Base Container Image, pre-configured repository access is provided so that  container application developers can retrieve language packages as needed to support their application requirements. The SLE BCI is tailored for modern containerized application development and CI/CD application containerization.  Base Container Images for SLES 15 SP3 can be found here.

Realize up to 20% performance gain with new processor support

In SLES 15 SP3 we are adding the latest hardware enablement and performance improvements so our customers can benefit from the latest chipsets, as well as database services.

“They [SUSE] created the Linux upstream changes necessary to enable the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) features of Gen 2 AMD EPYC™ CPUs so we could support SLES 15 SP3 as a target OS in Google Cloud Confidential VMs.”  Nelly Porter, Google Group Product Manager, Cloud Security

Performance has been improved with hardware enablement and optimizations for AMD EPYC™, Intel Xeon®, Arm and Fujitsu processors and software accelerations with the NVIDIA Compute Module, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) and enhanced Virtual GPU support. The next generation AMD EPYC™ 7003 Series of processors, for example, provide outstanding performance across a wide spectrum of industry standard applications – delivering top performance with up to 19% more instructions per clock. We’ve also produced a new performance tuning guide for SLES on the recently released AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors.  More information can be found here.

We’ve upgraded to the latest databases like PostgreSQL 13 – which contains many new features and enhancements that deliver performance gains – from improving the handling of duplicate data in B-tree indexes to reducing the size of the index and increasing the search speed.

The performance enhancements and advanced security in SUSE Linux Enterprise are important for enterprises and cloud providers, where performance and time to value are critical to support the “innovate anywhere” environments.

Learn More

Additional information and specifics about this significant release is available and discussed in greater detail in several SUSECON Digital ‘21 sessions.

Thanks for reading!

Jeff Reser

Jeff.Reser@suse.com