SUSE Manager 4.1 Public Beta 3!

We are pretty excited to announce SUSE Manager 4.1 Public Beta 3.
As usual, we have prepared tons of updates and we hope you will like it.
We also now have a new Public Mailing List, so you can share your feedback with our Public Beta Community, our Engineering and our Product Managers.

Schedule changes

Changes to our Beta schedule were needed to adapt to the SLE 15 SP2 Beta schedule changes announced via: SLE 15 SP2 Schedule and Closing the openSUSE Leap Gap.

Here is the new schedule of SUSE Manager 4.1:

• Beta 2 – March 25th, 2020
• Beta 3 – April 23th, 2020
• Beta 4 – May 22th, 2020
• Release Candidate 1 – June 18th, 2020
• FCS – End of July, 2020 (First Customer Shipment)

Requirements and Beta Registration Codes

SLES 15 SP2 Public Beta is required as base OS, you can retreive it from here.
You will need at least 8 GB of main memory and 100GB of disk space to install the Server and 4 GB of main memory and 100GB of disk space to install the Proxy.

Registration is not working with your regular SUSE Manager key, special Beta Registration Code is required!
You need to request one via email to beta-programs@lists.suse.com.

You only need SUSE Manager 4.1 Beta registration codes for the purpose of installing the SUSE Manager 4.0 Server, Proxy and Retail. No SUSE Linux Enterprise Server registration code is needed.

Changes since SUSE Manager 4.0

SUSE Manager 4.1 Beta is based on SLES 15 SP2 Beta! For more details on SLES 15 SP2 Beta, please visit the dedicated sle-beta Web page.

If you are looking for the complete list of changes since SUSE Manager 4.0, please check out our Release Notes.

Changes since Beta 2

PostgreSQL 12

The database engine has been updated from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 12, which brings a number of performance and reliability improvements A detailed changelog is available upstream.

To prevent inconsistent configurations and data on upgrade or update, SUSE Manager 4.1 will refuse to start until the database migration from PostgreSQL 10 to PostgreSQL 12 has completed successfully.

Automatic database schema migrations and fail-over mechanism

Database schema upgrades are now applied automatically during services startup, so there is no need to call spacewalk-schema-upgrade manually. To prevent SUSE Manager services from starting if the schema upgrade has not successfully completed, a fail-over security mechanism has been implemented. More information here.

Salt 3000

Salt has been upgraded to the 3000 release for the SUSE Manager Server, Proxy and Client Tools. As part of this upgrade, the cryptography is now managed by the Python-M2Crypto library (which is itself based on the well-known OpenSSL).

We intend to regularly upgrade Salt to more recent versions. For more detail about changes in your manually-created Salt states, see the Salt upstream release notes 3000.

New documentation guides

Two new draft books have been added to the SUSE Manager documentation in version 4.1:

• • Large Deployments Guide.

Everything related to architecture and configuration for large (thousands of clients) deployments is contained in this guide. It contains all the documentation for the SUSE Manager Hub component. Some parts of the Salt guide that dealt with parameter tuning for large deployments have now been moved here too.

• • Public Cloud QuickStart Guide.

This new draft guide shows you the fastest way to get SUSE Manager up and running in a public cloud. It includes instructions for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Engine.

These are draft documents, so please provide feedback using the Resources menu in the online documentation.

Onboarding of passwordless clients

A new SSH private key authentication method, including use of a passphrase on the private key. To protect your security, the private key is only stored on the SUSE Manager Server during the bootstrap procedure and removed immediately after bootstrapping is complete, therefore the private key must be provided for each bootstrap.

This is only available from the API in Beta 3. Access to this feature using the WebUI will be available in a future release. Check the Release Notes for an example of how to use the new method.

SUSE Manager for Retail: Small stores

Where a dedicated SUSE Manager Server or SUSE Manager Retail Branch Server is not feasible, it is now possible to use a Retail Branch Server running in a remote datacenter or public cloud.

And more

• Monitoring enhancements
  • CaaSP dashboards
  • Updated Node Exporter
• Virtual storage pool support
• Proxy visibility in Systems Overview
• Improved sync status visibility
• RHEL 8 enhancements
  • Content Lifecycle Management filters for AppStreams
  • Prometheus exporters
• SUSE Manager for Retail: SLEPOS 15 SP2 clients

Please check out our Release Notes for the complete list of changes.

More Information

As always, there is a lot more changes that we did not cover her. So please visit https://www.suse.com/betaprogram/manager-beta for more information like known issues, beta schedule, how to report issues, how to start a discussion with SUSE Manager Beta community and more.

Have fun beta testing!

Your SUSE Manager Team