Search results: “harvester”

Modern application deployments rely heavily on containerization for its scalability, availability and ease of maintenance. Legacy applications implemented before the containerization era often use monolithic, hardware-centric architectures that are difficult to scale and manage.

In a production environment, where applications must be flexible at deployment, running and rolling out times, it is important to consider agility as one of the main points to consider when building or evolving your platform.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is a modern, modular operating system for both multimodal and traditional IT. In this article, I’ll provide a high-level overview of features, capabilities and limitations of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4 and highlight important product updates.SUSE Linux Enterprise Server leverages your workloads to provide security, agility and resiliency to your ecosystem. In this article, I am going to cover agility. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also now supports KubeVirt. 

Regarding agility, some relevant offerings from SUSE include:

• Base Container Images (BCI): BCI brings all the SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) experience into container workloads. It builds your applications in a secure, multi-stage and performance environment.
• Harvester HCI (HyperConverged Infrastructure) (KubeVirt): Harvester is a modern HCI solution that bridges the gap between the HCI software and the cloud-native ecosystem using technologies like Longhorn and KubeVirt to provide storage and virtualization capabilities.  It connects multiple interfaces to the Virtual Machines and provides isolation capabilities to the architecture. With Harvester and Kubernetes, you no longer need to manage traditional HCI infrastructure and cloud-native separately.
• SUSE Manager HUB: Scale your infrastructure and manage thousands of servers through a hub implementation of SUSE Manager.

Why SLE BCI?

While Alpine is the most used base image, when it comes to an enterprise use case, you should consider more variables before making a choice. Here are some of the reasons why SLE BCI (which I will shorten to simply BCI for now) is potentially a great fit.

• Maximum security: When it comes to developing applications, the world is moving and working in a cloud native ecosystem because of its emphasis on flexibility, agility and cost effectiveness. However, application security is often an afterthought in the initial stages of developing a new app. If developers do not choose their base image wisely, their application could be affected by security vulnerabilities, or it simply will not pass the required security certifications. When developing the SLE family of products, SUSE worked to ensure they meet the highest levels of security and compliance, including FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard), EAL4+, FSTEC, USG, CIS (Center for Internet Security) and DISA/STIG. All this work flows downstream to SLE BCI, making it one of the industry’s most secure base images for enterprise developers or independent software vendors to leverage.
• Available images: SUSE provides two sets of images through its registry, the base ones (bci-base, bci-minimal, bci-micro, bci-init) and the language-specific ones (Golang, rust, openJDK, python, ruby, and more).  Check out the registry!
• Supportability: One of the key factors that made me give BCI a try is the supportability matrix. So far, if I must test my application locally or for a Proof of Concept, I could use an Alpine or a specific language/runtime image. But when it comes to creating an enterprise-grade application, sooner than later, I will need to migrate to a supported one. SUSE fully supports bci-base. Customers with an active subscription agreement can open support cases or request new features through the official channels.Something else that captured my attention: the supportability matrix of BCI has no bounds with the underlying host where the application is running, which allows more flexibility and mixed ecosystems while keeping your application covered by the SUSE support umbrella.

SUSE Manager hub

Ecosystems need to scale as required. Managing servers in a lab is not comparable to managing different production environments where not only is managing servers important, but so is complying with security standards and maintaining health and ensuring compliance.  When it comes to managing an environment, whether it is pure SUSE or a mixed environment, there are some aspects we need to take into consideration:

• Compliance: through the templates and automation of new deployments, every new element or operating system would ensure that it is following the compliance definition for the ecosystem and the different environments defined.
• Security: An agile environment requires new features to be tested and new discovered vulnerabilities to be patched. Your ecosystem is as vulnerable as the weakest element you have deployed. With a centralized path, configuration, and package management, you will be aware of the vulnerabilities affecting your entire ecosystem and design the update or deployment strategy.
• Health: as part of day 2 operations, SUSE Manager centralizes the management of the risk of business disruptions and monitors downtime.
• Scalability: with new elements coming to the environment, it is also important to manage the infrastructure in a supported, feasible and performant manner. SUSE provides scalability up to 1 million clients in a hub-based architecture. Multiple SUSE Managers can be managed from a single hub node, aggregating clients and attaching them to a specific proxy server that is also managed by its own manager.  This allows you to have a centralized reporting database that is helpful since you do not have to look on each server to get the monitoring of a specific environment or subset of clients. In other words, everything is managed from a centralized hub. This architecture adds some features for complex environments or specific management requirements for compliance.  For example, for multi-tenancy you can use different managers to isolate server configurations. Check out the SUSE Manager product page for more information.
• Monitoring: Whether SUSE Manager is installed on a hub or standalone, each environment needs to be reported where you can see the relevant information you are looking for in a single glance. Ecosystems need to be agile and adaptable, deploying new servers, decommissioning the ones you no longer need and being aware of new elements added even from various sources. SUSE Manager can deploy multiple probes that you can configure to look after the most critical elements or the most relevant events for you.SUSE Manager uses Prometheus to monitor the elements and Grafana for the dashboards. You are not restricted to what comes with the product; instead, you can create customized dashboards to organize and show that information in a way that is more relevant. In a scenario where the monitoring comes from third-party software, SUSE Manager Monitoring can pull data from a single or multiple external sources and use it.No matter how you evolve your ecosystem, whether you do it through the deployment templates or use external deployers, SUSE Manager, through the Service Discovery features, can look for potential monitoring targets that add dynamic definitions on a living environment.

Trento

SAP environments are complex systems designed to accomplish complex challenges. They consist of several pieces including databases, high availability systems, applications servers and workloads. No matter where you deploy, on premise or in the cloud, all those pieces need to integrate with each other with their own setup processes and configurations. This implies that SAP environments are hard to deploy, configure and manage. Usually, the initial deployment and configuration of SAP requires enterprise admins and third-party integrators to reference SAP notes. It is a time- and resource-consuming task.

SAP setup process consists of several manual steps and configurations to deploy and maintain the software successfully. With so many elements to configure and handle, there are situations where misconfigurations and human errors lead to unexpected downtime.SUSE and SAP have been working together for the last 20 years to build up a stable integration between SAP and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, creating an in-depth operating system designed and certified for running SAP systems, databases and workloads.

Deploying and maintaining SAP environments is not a “fire and forget.” It requires maintenance and monitoring the status of the hosts, systems, databases and high availability pieces. To do that, you have to look for someone who can handle this as it is an extremely specific system. This is where Trento comes to the table. Trento is a containerized solution that provides a single console view to discover and manage all SAP systems components (databases, hosts, HA, databases and HANA Databases). Trento is the way to safeguard SAP ecosystems. The user will be notified when a bad configuration or a missing setup step is detected on any systems, recommendations on reducing time-consuming assets (like performing daily and manual revisions of the systems) or digging into the SAP documentation looking for a specific asset. Trento is the centralized piece of SAP infrastructure where the user can see the status of the ecosystem in a single dashboard, get recommendations on what is the best configuration for a specific environment and ensure the SAP ecosystem is deployed and running following best practices. Leverage SUSE’s expertise with SAP. Within SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, Trento is a first-class citizen that can leverage how well the operating system and the SAP ecosystem work together.

Conclusion

SUSE provides a stack to manage your infrastructure components, with a focus on agility without renouncing stability or security. This stack includes SUSE Manager, BCI images, Trento, and Harvester.  SUSE can manage multi-vendor ecosystems where SYSE systems and other operating systems are managed, patched and analyzed.  SUSE solutions keep your entire environment in compliance with the highest security standards.To learn more, go to Business Critical Linux, SUSE Security, SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images, SUSE Manager, and/or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Thanks for reading!

SUSECON is back! And once again (hopefully for the final time!) it will be a virtual conference. While many of us would love to be back together in person, there are some real benefits to hosting the conference virtually. One of these benefits is that there are no artificial limits on content, such as hotel room space, break times, etc. In a virtual conference, we can offer virtually unlimited learning possibilities!

SUSECON Digital 2022 Sessions

We just announced our SUSECON Digital 2022 Session Catalog, and it will blow you away! Last year had a lot of amazing content, but this year we have really outdone ourselves. Most of the content is listed now, but more will be added in the next couple of weeks. In total, we will have more than 200 sessions and demos in this year’s digital conference! That means 20% more Linux-related sessions, 20% more Edge sessions, 20% more demos and nearly 40% more Kubernetes sessions than last year!

In the mix with our extensive list of Technology breakout sessions this year you’ll find a couple of new arrivals for SUSECON Digital:

• Return of the Hands-On Labs – virtually!

  • Hands-On Labs are a key staple of in-person SUSECON events. We had to take a hiatus for the last couple of years due to Covid, but this year we will bring back a limited number of opportunities to have a hands-on experience with the product software! Expert instructors will walk you through the following topics in a virtual classroom, with personal instruction and attention at your pace. Attendance in these Labs is limited, so make sure you reserve your place on May 10 when the SUSECON Digital Session Registration goes live!
    • Introduction to Harvester HCI
    • NeuVector Basic Deployment
    • Reduce downtime with SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability

• Increased focus on business-level content.

  • While SUSECON is well known for outstanding technical content, we consistently try to provide content that helps business decision makers understand the value of our open source solutions. This year we are introducing topics that are more than simplified product overviews by discussing the real business drivers that represent challenges business leaders face every day, including topics like cost optimization, digital sustainability, Green IT, secure software supply chains and digital transformation.

And there’s more… as always!

One of our core commitments at SUSE is to always surprise and delight our customers, and at SUSECON we continue to do just that. As with our in-person events, we invite you to come for the content, then stay for the experience! Besides the amazing session content, see what else SUSECON Digital 2022 will have to offer:

• Inspiring Keynotes

  • As always, the conference will be headlined by our executive team delivering inspiring messages and laying out our company direction for the future. Our CEO, Melissa Di Donato, will lead off the keynote series this year, followed by the General Managers of our Business-critical Linux, Enterprise Container Management and Edge Solutions businesses. Be sure to read Melissa’s blog for more information about these.
  • This year we are also excited to announce the return of the Technology Demo Keynote (remember Demopalooza?!?) with our CTO, Dr. Thomas Di Giacomo. Dr.T and his team of experts will demo new solutions that underscore both SUSE’s commitment to full stack security as well as our dedication to innovation.

• Networking with Experts

  • Have you ever had burning questions, but you just didn’t know who to ask or how to reach them if you did know? SUSECON Digital 2022 will feature a robust networking environment where attendees can meet and mingle with hundreds of SUSE employees. Meet the engineers working on your favorite project. Talk to our Product Managers and give them your input on new solutions. Our presenters will be available to chat during most session presentation times, and then will available for small group discussions at scheduled times throughout the event. I encourage you to take full advantage of the networking tools to get to know us better!

• Leisure time

  • Speaking of getting to know us better – be sure to check out something else new this year: SUSEDoes. In this virtual arena, a few brave SUSE employees will invite you to find out more about unconventional topics at a personal level. Ranging from cake baking to cold water swimming to building off-the-grid cabins, this will be a fun way to get to know us better!
  • When your brain just can’t absorb any more information – take a break and have some fun! The SUSECON Digital 2022 portal will have some retro games and light-hearted entertainment features as well to provide some much-needed downtime.

There are still a lot of great reasons to attend a virtual conference. So if you only do one this year, SUSECON Digital 2022 should be that one! Register today and we’ll see you June 7-9!

We interviewed a number of existing SUSE Rancher customers and asked them what they loved about it. The findings are nothing short of astonishing! We are posting them here since they may help you with your container/cloud native journey.

1.  Customers love our free training – Rancher Academy. It was mentioned by almost all participants. Kubernetes management has some intricacies so starting with training is always a great idea. We have you covered.

2.  SUSE Rancher 2.6 came out with many new features – the new web interface is beautiful and intuitive. Customers love it for the looks and the ease of use it offers. The point and click UI lowers the learning curve considerably.

3.  SUSE Rancher plugs in painlessly with your existing Kubernetes clusters, Active Directory services for authentication etc., existing contracts with cloud providers and so on. Rancher is a team player!

4. SUSE Rancher is truly heterogeneous in terms of your choice of operating system – it can be deployed on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat etc. Here is the full support matrix.

5.  SUSE Rancher handles Kubernetes management complexity better than other competing solutions. We spoke to a tech admin who was struggling with one of our competitors. They then tested with Rancher and things just fell into place.

6. Our per node pricing is about as simple as it gets. No vCore/vCPU metrics plus extra terms and even more confusion. Price is per managed node – that’s it.

7. Customers have loved Rancher from the beginning. After the merger with SUSE, a banking customer we spoke to, felt even better about it since it became a part of a larger support organization. Support, after all, is the bread and butter of any open-source business.

8. What is more, after the merger with SUSE, Rancher got huge boost in engineering resources. Projects like Harvester became products and new ones are getting launched and proving value to enterprises. Customers are honestly pleased to see that we are restlessly continuing along the path of innovation.

9. Customers chose SUSE Rancher because there already was some Rancher usage/experience within their organization. It is simply a cool product and dev teams love it!

10. Customers love the openness of Rancher and its closeness to pure Kubernetes. They shared with us that other vendors have their own Kubernetes version which, in their words, is a drawback!

11. One of our customers shared that Rancher was chosen for being an all-in-one solution – solved a number of connection issues that came with downtime. It made troubleshooting so much easier for them.

If you are still on the fence with your choice of Kubernetes management – start with the Rancher Academy. Get a few folks trained and seek their feedback later. We’ll be there to help you along the way.