What’s new in SUSE Manager 3.2

Did you realize that the title rhymes? There is an old saying that if something rhymes it must be true. And indeed, in this blog I’m only going to tell you hard facts about SUSE Manager 3.2, the latest release of our best-in-class open source infrastructure management solution that we announced today:

Ready for the future

Let’s start with the obvious, but no less important improvements: Like any new release, SUSE Manager 3.2 comes with a couple of notable updates.

Current Salt version

We updated SUSE Manager to Salt 2018.3.0 (“Oxygen”). Our version of Oxygen even contains many of the fixes in the 2018.3.1 release that just came out a few days ago. I blogged about what’s new in Oxygen back in May. This is the first version of Salt that is ready for Python 3.

We’ve also released maintenance updates for Manager 3.0 and 3.1 as well as SUSE Linux Enterprise 12. And of course SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 comes with it, using Python 3, from the first day we ship it.

Spacewalk 2.8

Manager 3.2 was updated to the latest version of Spacewalk. With this final update we’re also saying good bye and thank you for a great time to the Spacewalk community: Future versions of SUSE Manager will use Uyuni as its upstream project.

Enabled for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15

We’ve made sure that SUSE Manager 3.2 is a perfect fit for the new SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 (“SLE 15”). In my earlier post about Beta 3 I explained those improvements in more detail.

And there’s more to come: Later this summer we’re going to start porting SUSE Manager itself to SLE 15. We will utilize its new unified installer. That will allow you to install SUSE Manager right from the common installation media that all SLE 15-based products share.

Easily manage large complex deployments

It is now even easier to manage Linux deployments of any size from both the SUSE Manager web UI as well as the APIs SUSE Manager provides:

Formulas with Forms reloaded

As reported in my post from March, we have massively improved and extended the Formulas with Forms framework. You can now use it to model even complex parameters (e.g. for user management or configuring partitions, but also for infrastructure services like DNS or DHCP) and fully API-enabled them. They allow for a clean separation of concerns:

• Experts can prepare secure organization defaults as Salt states.
• Day-to-day admins just need to fill in the customization parameters for particular systems or groups of systems.

The real power of this framework can hardly be described in words. So I’m planning to follow up with some hands-on examples in later posts.

Salt states through the UI and “salted” action chains

Finally, we’ve carefully listened to those of you who are still using the more file-oriented configuration management that SUSE Manager featured before we added Salt to the mix: In Manager 3.2, we brought “old-style” configuration channels and Salt’s state-based configuration management together in one UI. This feature was also back-ported to Manager 3.1.

In an upcoming maintenance update we’re planning to improve this integration even more: We’ll make it really easy to use Formulas with Forms together with web-defined Salt configuration states!

And as I’ve mentioned as well in my Beta 3 announcement, action chains are back as well! With this feature we’re enabling configuration actions that were almost impossible to do with plain Salt. Now you can to do a reboot in-between two configuration steps. And you can safely update Salt with Salt itself as part of a system update.

Stay tuned for further enhancements of the action chains feature, including re-usable stored actions.

More to come!

We already have one more feature in the making that will be released with one of the first maintenance updates for SUSE Manager 3.2: After enabling image creation for containers in Manager 3.1, we’re adding KIWI-based image creation for installable Linux OS images and virtual machines.

So if you don’t want to miss those news, make sure you bookmark my blog channel on the device you take with you on your summer vacation. Or even better: Take a real (and offline) vacation from work and let yourself get surprised on your first day back in office. 🙂

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany, where we give you all the hard facts, whether they rhyme or not.