SUSE Manager: The Journey Continues

A little more than 6 months ago, SUSE launched SUSE Manager 4.3.  It was an exciting launch because for the first time, we rearchitected the solution so that you could implement the SUSE Manager Proxy as a set of containers.  Hub architecture and reporting capabilities were also improved for better scalability.  Client automation got a big boost by introducing the salt bundle.  In case you don’t know, salt provides much of the automation tasks for SUSE Manager.  Providing a salt bundle means you now have a consolidated, single-binary package that includes all the Python dependencies and everything the client needs to communicate with the SUSE Manager server.  This makes the deployment of agents a lot easier to do and maintain.  You can learn all about the launch here and the salt bundle here.

SUSE Manager really is the solution you need to keep your systems secure and compliant – almost like magic.

6 Months Later: What’s New?

You might know that about every 5 weeks, SUSE Engineering puts out a minor release of SUSE Manager.  What does that mean for you?  It means that our team is constantly innovating to make the product even better and more usable.  And today we are on 4.3.4 – the fourth such release since 4.3.

SUSE Manager has always been able to manage multiple Linux distributions.  In fact, we have some customers who have yet to switch to SUSE Linux offerings but choose SUSE Manager as their management solution for all their Linux installed base because of its power and adaptability. Now that’s saying something!

We are expanding SUSE Manager’s reach with this latest minor release.  We now support RHEL 9, SUSE Liberty Linux 9, Rocky Linux 9, Alma Linux 9, and Oracle Linux 9. In addition, SUSE Manager 4.3.4 provides full support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro clients.  And these are in addition to the more than 15 distros that SUSE Manager already supported.  SUSE Manager is the only management tool that supports all these disparate distros from a single console – anywhere – and in exactly the same way. As we like to say, we aspire to manage “Any Linux, anywhere, at any scale”.

Additionally, SUSE Manager has undergone several improvements related to monitoring, usability, and security making it an even more powerful and user-friendly system administration tool.  One noted update is to help users with their compliance so that they will be notified of SUSE subscriptions about to expire in near future or have already expired.  SUSE Manager will show this alert on the Overview page as well as provide a notification under the notification tab.

For more information, on all these updates you can check out the documentation and release notes here.

The best part:  To get all these updates and enhancements, you simply need to perform a simple in-place update from SUSE Manager Server 4.1, 4.2, or 4.3.

The Road Ahead

If you’ve been following SUSE Manager for any length of time, you know that we’ve been launching a major release yearly along with the new Service Pack of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.  Well, this year we’re doing things a little bit differently.

While we will be announcing a new version in the upcoming months alongside SLE 15 SP5, it will not be a major release.  What does this mean?

We will continue to bring you innovative new features, such as:

• SUSE Manager will be including the planned new features steadily in every 4.3 maintenance update.
• The version we launch in the upcoming months will indeed support SLE 15 SP5.
• The update to the new version will be an in-place migration. Simple as following the documentation here.
• SUSE Manager 4.3 will have a longer supported lifecycle. That means that you will continue to have access to SUSE’s stellar technical support team until June 2025.

For SUSE Engineering, this brings also good news.  We will be spending the next year cooking up some significant changes to SUSE Manager.  After all, your business is transforming; we want SUSE Manager to transform with you.

Stay tuned!