Release Notes #

If you are upgrading from a previous SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications release, you should review at least the following sections:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP4 has been submitted to the certification bodies for:

For more information about certification, see https://www.suse.com/security/certificates.html.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is backed by award-winning support from SUSE, an established technology leader with a proven history of delivering enterprise-quality support services.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 has a 13-year life cycle, with 10 years of General Support and 3 years of Extended Support. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications comes with Extended Service Pack Overlap Support by default, this means SP5 will be fully maintained and supported for the first 18 months and then gets support for 3 years under the conditions of LTSS.

For more information, check our Support Policy page https://www.suse.com/support/policy.html or the Long Term Service Pack Support Page https://www.suse.com/support/programs/long-term-service-pack-support.html.

To receive support, you need an appropriate subscription with SUSE. For more information, see https://www.suse.com/support/programs/subscriptions/?id=SUSE_Linux_Enterprise_Server_for_SAP_Applications.

The following definitions apply:

For contracted customers and partners, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is delivered with L3 support for all packages, except for the following:

SUSE will only support the usage of original packages. That is, packages that are unchanged and not recompiled.

Technology previews are packages, stacks, or features delivered by SUSE which are not supported. They may be functionally incomplete, unstable or in other ways not suitable for production use. They are included for your convenience and give you a chance to test new technologies within an enterprise environment.

Whether a technology preview becomes a fully supported technology later depends on customer and market feedback. Technology previews can be dropped at any time and SUSE does not commit to providing a supported version of such technologies in the future.

Give your SUSE representative feedback about technology previews, including your experience and use case.

The SLE 15 SP4 product line is made up of modules that contain software packages. Each module has a clearly defined scope. Modules differ in their life cycles and update timelines.

The modules available within the product line based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 at the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP4 are listed in the Modules and Extensions Quick Start at https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP3/html/SLES-all/article-modules.html.

Not all SLE modules are available with a subscription for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP4 itself (see the column Available for).

For information about the availability of individual packages within modules, see https://scc.suse.com/packages.

Extensions add extra functionality to the system and require their own registration key, usually at additional cost. Most extensions have their own release notes documents that are available from https://www.suse.com/releasenotes.

The following extensions are available for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 SP4:

The following extension is not covered by SUSE support agreements, available at no additional cost, and without an extra registration key:

This sections lists derived and related products. Usually, these products have their own release notes documents that are available from https://www.suse.com/releasenotes.

The log level of the deprecation warnings regarding killmode=None have been reduced. Instead of warning, they are now logged at the debug log level.

SUSE is committed to helping provide better insights into the consumption of SUSE subscriptions regardless of where they are running or how they are managed; physical or virtual, on-prem or in the cloud, connected to SCC or Repository Mirroring Tool (RMT), or managed by SUSE Manager. To help you identify or filter out systems in SCC that are no longer running or decommissioned, SUSEConnect now features a daily “ping”, which will update system information automatically.

For more details see the documentation at https://documentation.suse.com/subscription/suseconnect/single-html/SLE-suseconnect-visibility/.

In the past for Linux the systemV init service sapinit was starting the SAP Host Agent and all the sapstartsrv processes listed in /usr/sap/sapservices. A real systemd integration was not available.

Now the native integration of SAP Host Agent is started via the saphostagent.service unit. Adaptations to the saphostagent.service unit must be done by adding a so-called drop-in file.

For any native integrated SAP instance a systemd unit with name schema SAP<SID>_<INO> (for example, SAPEN1_10) is added. Adaptations should be done using a drop-in file. It is highly recommended to still use the sapcontrol functions which guarantees also the functionality of cluster integration like the sap-suse-cluster-connector.

Before you start your new installation or update to the native systemd integration, make sure you update the resource agent packages to the newest available versions. The native SAP systemd integration is supported starting with the following package versions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15:

For details please refer to the manual pages ocf_suse_SAPStartSrv(7), SAPHanaSR(7), and SAPHanaSR-ScaleOut(7).

The RPM SAPHanaSR now contains an HANA HADR provider hook script for the method postTakeover(). This script can be used to change HANA memory limits and table preload for the replicated HANA database in the scale-up cost-optimized setup. For details please refer to manual page susCostOpt.py(7).

The RPM SAPHanaSR now contains an HANA HADR provider hook script for the method preTakeover(). This script can be used to block manual HANA sr_takeover as long as the SUSE cluster is controlling the HANA database. Manual sr_takeover will be allowed only in context of the described maintenance procedures. For details please refer to manual pages susTkOver.py(7) and SAPHanaSR_maintenance_examples(7).

The RPMs SAPHanaSR and SAPHanaSR-ScaleOut now contain an HANA HADR provider hook script for the method srServiceStateChanged(). This script can be used to speed up the takeover in case of a failing HANA indexserver. HANA scale-out is supported only without standby nodes. For details please refer to manual pages susChkSrv.py(7), SAPHanaSR-hookHelper(8), and SAPHanaSR-manageProvider(8).

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications 15 supports Intel Optane DC persistent memory. This enables SAP workloads, such as SAP HANA to benefit from persistent memory This shortens start times of the system and provides better system stability.

From a file system perspective, the XFS file system is supported for persistent memory, with SAP HANA running in DAX mode. Make sure to also check the SAP instructions for using persistent memory with SAP HANA. SUSE is working closely with SAP on future developments.

If there are pmem namespaces, these need to be destroyed before the installation. To mount persistent memory directly on boot, the respective entries need to be added to /etc/fstab, for example:

/dev/pmem0    /mnt/pmem0    xfs    dax    0  0
/dev/pmem1    /mnt/pmem1    xfs    dax    0  0

Namespaces need to be created individually. Execute the following command for each namespace you want to create:

ndctl create-namespace --mode=fsdax --map=dev

Because the systemd and udev default timeout may be too short for large memory setups to become usable, your system may run into a timeout and the boot process may stop with an emergency shell. To prevent this from happening, increase the timeout to 1200 seconds. Create the file /etc/systemd/system/systemd-udev-settle.service.d/00-override.conf with the following content:

[Service]
TimeoutSec=1200s
ExecStart=/usr/bin/udevadm settle -t 300

Important

In an earlier version of this document, we recommended mounting persistent memory with the nofail option in /etc/fstab. Unfortunately this frequently required a manual mount of pmem devices on reboot. To automatically mount pmem file systems after reboot, we strongly recommend removing the nofail option and modifying the timeout value as described above.

The following features and packages have been removed in this release.

The following features and packages are deprecated and will be removed with a future service pack of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications.