Introducing SUSE Manager 4.2

SUSE Manager 4.2, the latest release from SUSE, further delivers a best-in-class open source infrastructure and systems management solution that enhances automation, simplifies management, and extends client support.

Catering for all of your software infrastructure management needs SUSE Manager 4.2 is a open source infrastructure and systems management solution for your Hybrid Cloud IT – from edge to datacenter to cloud.

Designed to help your enterprise DevOps and IT Operations teams to reduce complexity and regain control of IT and IoT assets, increase efficiency whilst meeting security policies and optimizing operations with automation to reduce costs.

New to SUSE Manager 4.2:

Integration of Ansible into a SUSE Manager automation environment to protect customer investment and ease migration (Tech Preview)

Configuration and automation platforms have become increasingly important to control an organization’s ever-growing IT landscape. There are a variety of popular tools in the market and companies may have already made investments in a particular tool, one of them being Ansible.

Adopting SUSE Manager, or migrating to it, does not mean that you should necessarily renounce your previous configuration management systems investment. SUSE Manager 4.2 provides support for Ansible packages on SLES and connects to the Ansible controller nodes on any client operating system to gather the inventory and manage clients with SUSE Manager. This means you do not have to re-implement your Ansible automation solution. SUSE Manager 4.2 allows you to simply re-use and run your Ansible playbooks. Saving time and resources by consolidating tools while keeping existing automation investments. This also makes migration to the SUSE landscape easier for our customers.

Combined with its strong Salt capabilities, it enhances SUSE Manager’s configuration and automation capabilities helping you to orchestrate even the largest environments – across cloud and on-prem.

Enhanced Security and Compliance by providing OpenSCAP content for SLES and other Linux operating systems

OpenSCAP assists administrators and auditors with assessment, measurement, and enforcement of security baseline through audit scans by using content produced by SUSE (for SLES) and other Linux operating systems. Easily check system security configuration settings and examine systems for signs of compromise by using rules based on standards and specifications. Use the OpenSCAP feature to assess the compliance level of your client systems according to the selected profile and apply remediation scripts to achieve better compliance when needed.

Configuration Visibility: Clearly identify where your configuration is coming from

Knowing what is the precise configuration being applied to a system when you are managing many of them can be challenging: configurations may come from your organization, one of the many system groups, formulas, configuration and state channels or even be assigned directly to the system.

Usability enhancements across the SUSE Manager WebUI now provide a clear and direct way of knowing exactly where your configuration states and channels are coming from.

Enhanced patch management functionality to help customers streamline the use of Live Patching

Live Patching helps customers to bring down reboot cycles to once a year which saves companies time, resources and availability compared to not using live patching at all. Customers need to prepare for reboot ahead of time before the live kernel approaches the end of life. The implementation of the kernel lifecycle and live kernel patch installation feature in 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, for example, schedule a reboot during a maintenance window, all from the UI.

Optimized performance with virtual machine tuning

Virtual Machines can be created quickly and easily but the default configuration settings may not be the best ones 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.

High-availability virtualization cluster

SUSE Manager virtualization combined with the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability extension enable the creation of virtualization host clusters with support for live migration and shared storage. Easily configure your virtualization cluster with formulas with forms.

Simplification of openSUSE Leap to SLES migration – Makes migrating from openSUSE Leap to SLES possible in a few clicks.

SUSE Manager 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. Instead of replacing the repositories and manually re-installing packages, you can now do the migration in a single action.

With more and more workloads moving to cloud, SUSE Manager caters to where your workloads are going. It is silicone and platform agnostic and provides powerful content control – across hypervisors, clouds, or architectures. SUSE Manager 4.2 enhances its cloud capabilities with:

Expanded OS support with Amazon Linux 2 and Alma Linux 8 and streamlined client onboarding

Adding to its extensive list of Linux distributions, SUSE Manager 4.2 introduces support for Amazon Linux 2 and Alma Linux 8, further enabling the management of all your Enterprise Linux distributions from a single tool – no matter where they are located. SUSE Manager now supports the management of SLES, RHEL, openSUSE, Oracle Linux, CentOS, Alma Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, and Amazon Linux. Alibaba Cloud Linux is also available as a community-supported operating system.

SUSE Manager is easier than ever to use in the public cloud with usability and user experience improvements, further simplifying the management of your cloud deployments and client onboarding through cloud-init, Terraform and other cloud native mechanisms.

SLE Micro Support (Tech preview)

SLE Micro is an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system purpose built for edge computing. It leverages the enterprise hardened security and compliance components of SUSE Linux Enterprise and merges them with a modern, immutable, developer-friendly OS platform.

SUSE Manager 4.2 provides initial support for SLE Micro 5.0 clients. Not all SUSE Manager functionalities will initially be available for SLE Micro. Please check the release notes for the latest updates on supported features.

For more information https://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager/