Choosing SUSE for the Future of Linux

We backport fixes into the CentOS code, the same way we do with our own software—keeping 100% compatibility of API and application binary interface (ABI). We’re fixing the vulnerabilities you have without breaking anything. We’ve done this for decades. Now, we’re happy to do it for you.

You won’t be changing any infrastructure, so you don’t need to worry about downtime. You’re simply going to remove patch repositories from Red Hat and install the channels from SUSE.

No, but with SUSE Liberty Linux you can have the choice to run SLES in your environment, letting you adapt your Linux environment to your requirements.

SUSE Liberty Linux is fully compatible on the application binary interface level with the versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (“RHEL”) currently supported and available today, and with CentOS. User-space applications that run on RHEL are expected to run with equivalent performance and functionality on SUSE Liberty Linux. Factors in each customer's environment will impact the performance of the OS and the applications and so we advise customers to thoroughly test their specific applications on their OS prior to running production workloads.

SUSE stands behind its SUSE Liberty Linux offering to the same degree we do all our products and has decades' experience in assisting customers migrate between, and manage, different enterprise Linux workloads.

CIQ, Oracle and SUSE created the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), a collaborative trade association, to encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code. This foundation ensures the future of enterprise Linux because it is not tied to the will of a single company or vendor. The foundation members are collaborating to deliver source code, tools and systems through OpenELA for the community. For more information, see our joint press release.

Migrating to other free Linux distros means you need to adapt to a completely different environment, abandon the rpm format and the scripts you use to manage your OS, and learn new skills. Many of your applications may not weather such a big change well. You’ll also have to create a completely new environment, which is costly and risky. SUSE Liberty Linux offers continuity. You can just keep using what you currently have without changing a thing. And you'll be supported by an enterprise Linux company with more than 30 years of open source expertise, a 24x7 follow-the-sun, support organization, and a deep technical bench.

SUSE has developed solution bundles to specifically address your situation, which include attractive pricing and various levels of support, including opting out of support altogether. These product/support bundles allow you to choose as little or as much of SUSE support and products as you want or need.
Learn more about SUSE world-class support here

SUSE Services offers a variety of support and consulting services:

• Premium Support Services provides you with direct access to a named engineer that can support your entire environment, including RHEL, CentOS, SLES and Liberty.
• Consulting engagements to optimize your transition to Liberty. These range in scope from validating the health of your current infrastructure to implementing solutions to simplify management of your current infrastructure through migration services to design and implement a migration to SLES.

eLearning subscriptions get you and your team up to speed on all SUSE technologies at your convenience.

Multi-distro environments can be more complex, costly and difficult to manage. SUSE has solutions for that. For instance, SUSE Liberty Linux allows you to keep your existing RHEL investments but reduce costs and consolidate support under a single, trusted vendor: SUSE. And with SUSE Manager, IT can manage the entire Linux estate with a single console-based management tool—one that doesn’t just manage RHEL, but also manages, SLES, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian and many, many more. SUSE Manager eliminates complexity by bringing the entire Linux estate under IT’s reach for automated, push-button management. Think Network Satellite, but for your entire Linux estate. We also offer access to premium support engineers who will support your mixed IT environment (Liberty, RHEL, CentOS and SLES).

SUSE offers a time-limited (60 days) evaluation subscription of SUSE Liberty Linux. We have a chat for that. Go to the bottom of the page and click the Let’s chat button.

Remember, with the convert2RHEL tool, Red Hat is advocating a migration to RHEL. Migrations can be costly, risky and disruptive. On the other hand, SUSE provides the Liberate formula as a feature within SUSE Manager since version 4.3.11. It does automated in-place conversion on several EL clones and versions including CentOS 7. When you run the Liberate formula, all of your EL client repositories, such as CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux , will switch to those of SUSE Liberty Linux, hosted in SUSE Manager, then the steps to perform the conversion will be done with the option to replace all the packages with SUSE built and signed ones.

This is not a migration: you keep your current OS and get your patches and support from SUSE.