This SUSE product includes materials licensed to SUSE under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL requires that SUSE makes available certain source code that corresponds to the GPL-licensed material. The source code is available for download.

Also, for up to three years from SUSE’s distribution of the SUSE product, upon request SUSE will mail a copy of the source code. Requests should be sent by e-mail or as otherwise instructed here. SUSE may charge a fee to recover its reasonable costs of distribution.

Version Revision History

  • May 2019: 4.0 Beta 3 release

  • April 9th 2019: 4.0 Beta 2 release

  • March 13th 2019: 4.0 Beta 1 release

About SUSE Manager

SUSE Manager is a best-in-class open source infrastructure management solution for your software-defined infrastructure. Designed to help your enterprise DevOps and IT Operations teams to reduce complexity and regain control of IT and IoT assets, increase efficiency while meeting security policies and optimize operations with automation to reduce costs.

SUSE Manager helps your enterprise DevOps and IT operations teams to:

Optimize operations while reducing costs with automated Linux server and IoT device provisioning, patching and configuration for faster, consistent and repeatable server deployments.

  • Easily manage and optimize usage of your SUSE subscriptions helping you to ensure you aren’t buying subscriptions you don’t need

  • Improve onboarding efficiency of new HW with automated discovery (via PXE boot)

  • Optimize operations by enabling IT to quickly build container images based on their SUSE Manager repositories

  • Increase operational efficiency and support CI/CD, with a single tool (using Salt) for automated deployment of hardened OS templates (bare metal, VMs or containers) to tens of thousands of servers and IoT devices for faster, consistent & repeatable provisioning and configuration without compromising speed or security

  • Reduce costs with automated patch management enabling you to deploy patches based on software channel assigned to ensure systems are kept up to date

Reduce complexity and regain control of IT assets with a single tool to manage Linux systems across a variety of hardware architectures, hypervisors as well as container, IoT and cloud platforms

  • Reduce complexity with a single tool that lets you easily onboard and manage any Linux server connected to the network, from edge devices to your Kubernetes environment, no matter where it is located – in your data center, a 3rd party data center or in the cloud

  • Improve visibility of your infrastructure – with improved graphical visualization of your IT systems status and their relationships. Once an asset has been on-boarded, you’ll never “lose” it. So, if it goes offline or stops responding you will know. Quickly view your Linux assets and identify assets that need attention.

  • Simplify management and regain control of your IT assets with graphical visualization of your IT systems and their relationships as well as the capability to organize Linux servers into logical groupings – group them, tag them with additional details (location in the DC, Rack, etc)

    • Locate and store HW specifics for the servers and IoT devices enabling grouping/tagging by HW characteristics (vendor tags, CPU architecture, RAM)

Ensure compliance with internal security policies and external regulations with automated monitoring, tracking, auditing and reporting of your systems/devices, VMs and containers across your development, test and production environments.

  • Comprehensive monitoring solution, that enables operations to monitor your Linux environments from the HW through the OS layer up to their applications

  • Detailed compliance auditing and reporting with the ability to track all HW and SW changes made to your managed Linux infrastructure

  • Easily track system compliance with automated patch management ensures daily notifications of systems not compliant with the current patch level

  • Faster non-compliant remediation with the ability to quickly identify systems deployed in hybrid cloud and container infrastructures that are out of compliance to hardened profiles/templates based on your own internal security policies

About SUSE Manager 4.0

SUSE Manager 4.0, the latest release of SUSE’s best-in-class open source infrastructure management software, comes with new enhancements focused on lowering costs, improving DevOps efficiency and easily managing large complex deployments across IoT, cloud and container infrastructures. As a key component of a software-defined infrastructure, SUSE Manager 4.0 provides three key benefits:

  • Lower costs and simplify deployment while easily scaling larger environments for Public Cloud infrastructures and Kubernetes deployments.

  • Improve DevOps efficiency and meet compliance requirements with a single tool to manage and maintain everything from your IoT edge devices to your containerized workloads.

  • Easily manage large complex deployments with new extended forms-based UI capabilities

Keep Informed

You can stay up-to-date regarding information about SUSE Manager and SUSE products:

Installation

Requirements

SUSE Manager Server 4.0 is a bundle of SLES 15 SP1 for x86-64, Power Systems (ppc64le), or z Systems (s390x) and the SUSE Manager Server application.

With the adoption of a unified installer in SLE 15, system roles are the way to customize the installation for each product’s needs.

The new SUSE Manager Server 4.0 system roles provides an easier way to install the Operating System and the SUSE Manager Server application together with specific pre-configured system settings.

This addresses the need of enterprise deployments to standardize on the base operating system as well as specific storage setups.

PostgreSQL is the only supported database. Using a remote PostgreSQL database is not supported.

Update from previous versions of SUSE Manager Server

In-place updates from previous versions of SUSE Manager Server are not supported.

However you can migrate the data from your SUSE Manager Server 3.2.

Note that the SUSE Manager Server 3.2 needs to have PostgreSQL 10 as its database.

See the Upgrade Guide for detailed instructions on how to upgrade.

All connected clients will continue to run and are manageable unchanged.

Migrating from RHN Satellite

Is conditionally supported with SUSE Manager Server 4.0.

If you have the need to migrate from RHN Satellite to SUSE Manager Server 4.0, please get in contact with a SUSE sales engineer or a SUSE consultant before starting the migration.

Scaling SUSE Manager

The default configuration of SUSE Manager, when deployed on appropriate hardware as described in the getting started guide, will scale to a 4-digit number of clients.

Scaling beyond that number needs special consideration as described in the advanced topic guide

One size never fits all. Getting advise from a SUSE partner, sales engineer, or consultant is recommended to adapt SUSE Manager to your environment.

Channels with large number of packages

Some channels, like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, come with an enormous number of packages.

If you have channels with a large number of packages added to SUSE Manager, taskomatic might run out of memory.

In this case it’s recommended to increase the maximum amount of memory allowed for taskomatic by editing /etc/rhn/rhn.conf and adding

taskomatic.java.maxmemory=4096

to this file.

A restart of taskomatic is needed after this change.

The number 4096 gives 4 GB of memory to taskomatic (up from the default 2GB) and should be raised even higher if taskomatic still runs out of memory.

Keep in mind this will affect to the total memory required by SUSE Manager Server.

Major changes since SUSE Manager Server 3.2

Prometheus Monitoring

As part of the first preview of the Monitoring feature, we will provide packages for the latest versions of Prometheus and Grafana. We will also provide packages for the following Prometheus exporters, available for SLE12 and SLE15:

Some of those exporters will be pre-installed on SUSE Manager Server as part of its self-monitoring. Together they will provide hardware, operating system, database, JVM and some internal SUSE Manager metrics.

In addition, we will include a formula to install and manage Node and PostgreSQL exporters on Salt managed clients. This formula will be configurable via SUSE Manager UI.

Content Lifecycle Management

The new Content Lifecycle Management feature provides the capability to clone software channels through a lifecycle of several environments.

You are able to create content projects, select a custom set of software channels as sources and create a lifecycle made of environments. You can now define Filter to exclude packages with specific names. More Filters will be added later.

Once you have selected some sources you can build the selected set which will populate the first environment. After the the first environment is built you can promote it through the environment lifecycle to the next environment in the loop. You can see the status of the built.

The result of the build (therefore the content of every environment) is a channel tree (made of cloned software channels of the sources selection) and you can assign systems to it.

Virtualization Management

The existing virtualization features have been enhanced for salt minions based systems. The state of virtual machines can be managed for all systems with the Virtualization entitlement. Salt minion virtualization host systems can also create virtual machines using a prebuilt disk image.

The following features have been added for salt minion systems only:

  • Deleting virtual machines.

  • Editing virtual machines to add or remove network interfaces or disk, change CPU and memory allocation or the display type.

  • Quick update of the list and state of virtual machines.

  • Displaying virtual machines graphical display in a new tab.

Updated Documentation Structure

We have received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback about our documentation over the years, but we have also received some excellent ideas for improvement. That is how we know that the content we have is great, but it was sometimes difficult to find. In this release, we have reorganized our documentation and updated our tooling to make it clearer where information is, and make it easier for you to find the content you need, when you need it.

Old Naming Format

  • Getting Started

  • Best Practices

  • Reference

  • Advanced Topics

New Naming Format

  • Installation Guide (Requirements, supported platforms, installation methods, etc)

  • Client Configuration Guide (Configuring and connecting clients to SUSE Manager)

  • Upgrade Guide (Migrate and update clients and SUSE Manager)

  • Reference Guide (Comprehensive guide to the Web UI)

  • Administration Guide (Maintenance and administration tasks in SUSE Manager)

  • Salt Guide (A comprehensive guide to Salt for system administrators)

  • Retail Guide (A guide to using SUSE Manager for Retail)

  • Architecture Guide (Details on components, salt/traditional architectures, and diagrams)

Ubuntu Clients

Support management of Ubuntu clients were added (Salt minion based only).

The Client Tools Channel can be setup like for other Products using the Web UI or mgr-sync add product command line.

The following feature are supported:

  • Bootstrapping and performing initial state runs such as setting repositories and performing profile updates

  • Creating a bootstrap repository

  • Assigning .deb channels to minions

  • Information displayed in System details pages

  • Package install, update, and remove

  • Package install using Package States

  • Configuration and state channels

However, the root user on Ubuntu is disabled by default, so in order to use bootstrapping, you will require an existing user with sudo privileges for Python.

Setting up Channels

With SUSE Manager you get access to the Client Tools channel. For the distribution you need to setup Ubuntu repositories as custom channels using a local mirror. It is recommended to make them child channels of either ubuntu-16.04-pool-amd64 or ubuntu-18.04-pool-amd64 depending on the used Ubuntu version.

  1. In the SUSE Manager WebUI, navigate to Software > Manage Software Channels > Manage Repositories and click "Create Repository".

  2. In the Create Repository dialog, use these values to create a new repository:

  3. Click "Create Repository" to create the repository.

  4. Navigate to Software > Manage Software Channels > Overview and click "Create Channel".

  5. In the Create Software Channel dialog, create the channel as required for your environment. Ensure that in the Architecture field, you select AMD64 Debian. It is recommended to select either ubuntu-16.04-pool-amd64 or ubuntu-18.04-pool-amd64 as Parent Channel depending on your OS version.

  6. Click "Create Channel" to create the software channel.

  7. Navigate to Software > Manage Software Channels > Overview and select your new channel from the channel list.

  8. In the Repositories tab, click the Add/Remove tab, and select your new repository from the repository list.

  9. Click the "Update Repositories" button

  10. In the Repositories tab, click the Sync tab, and click the "Sync Now" button to synchronize the repository. A regular schedule can be configured on this page as well.

Note that you currently need to use Ubuntu universe repositories to install the Client Tools. In future versions this is not needed anymore. Check also the announcement about Beta Client Tools repositories for Ubuntu.

Salt 2019.2.0

Salt has been upgraded to the final 2019.2.0 release.

We do intend to upgrade Salt regularly to more recent versions.

For changes in your manually created Salt states, please see the Salt 2019.2 upstream release notes.

Base system upgrade

The Base system was upgraded to SLES15 SP1. With this all code was ported to run with python3 and openJDK11.

SUSE Manager Proxy versions

SUSE Manager Server 4.0 can work with version 3.2 of SUSE Manager Proxy.

When upgrading, upgrade the server first, followed by proxies. See the advanced topics manual for detailed upgrade instructions.

Inter Server Sync

When upgrading, upgrade the Inter Server Sync Master first, followed by the Inter Server Sync Slaves.

Support

Supportconfig confidentiality disclaimer

When handling Service Requests, supporters and engineers may ask for the output of the supportconfig tool from the SUSE Manager Server or clients.

The standard disclaimer applies:

Detailed system information and logs are collected and organized in a
manner that helps reduce service request resolution times.
Private system information can be disclosed when using this tool.

If this is a concern, please prune private data from the log files.

Several startup options are available to exclude more sensitive
information. Supportconfig data is used only for diagnostic purposes
and is considered confidential information.

In the SUSE Manager Server’s case, please be aware that supportconfig’s output will contain information about clients as well.

In particular, debug data for the Subscription Matching feature contain a list of the registered clients, their installed product and some minimal hardware information (CPU socket count). It also contains a copy of subscription data available from the SUSE Customer Center.

If this is a concern, please prune data in the subscription-matcher directory in the spacewalk-debug tarball.

Supportability of embedded software components

All software components embedded into SUSE Manager, like Cobbler for PXE booting, are only supported in the context of SUSE Manager. Stand-alone usage is not supported.

Support for EOL’ed products

The SUSE Manager engineering team provides 'best effort' support for products past their end-of-life date. See the Product Support Lifecycle page.

This support is limited to scenarios to bring production systems to a supported state. Either by migrating to a supported service pack or by upgrading to a supported product version.

spacewalk-utils

spacewalk-utils, a packaged set of command line tools, continues to be L1* supported only - with some exceptions. Any of these commands needs expertise and can break your system. However, we consider these tools valuable enough to be included, but not fully supported.

  • L1 (Problem determination, which means technical support designed to provide compatibility information, usage support, on-going maintenance, information gathering and basic troubleshooting using available documentation.)

The following tools of spacewalk-utils are fully supported:

  • spacewalk-clone-by-date

  • spacewalk-sync-setup

  • spacewalk-manage-channel-lifecycle

phantomjs

phantomjs is a dependency of grafana and will be supported only this context.

Providing feedback to our products

In case of encountering a bug please report it through your support contact.

Documentation and other information

Technical Information: SUSE Manager contains additional or updated documentation for SUSE Manager Server 4.0.

These Release Notes are available online. Further information about SUSE Manager is available [in the Wiki http://wiki.microfocus.com/index.php/SUSE_Manager]

Visit http://www.suse.com for the latest Linux product news from SUSE and http://www.suse.com/download-linux/source-code.html for additional information on the source code of SUSE Linux Enterprise products.

Legal Notices

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Further, SUSE makes no representations or warranties with regard to any software, and specifically disclaims any express or implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. Further, SUSE reserves the right to make changes to any and all parts of SUSE software, at any time, without any obligation to notify any person or entity of such changes.

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This release notes document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-ND-4.0). You should have received a copy of the license along with this document. If not, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/.

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Thank you for using SUSE Manager Server in your business.

Your SUSE Manager Server Team.