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.

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

Version Revision History

  • May 2019: 4.0 RC 1 release

  • May 3rd 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. It is designed to help enterprise DevOps and IT Operations teams reduce complexity, regain control of IT and IoT assets, reduce costs, and increase efficiency while meeting security policies and optimizing operations through automation.

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 are not buying subscriptions that you do not need.

  • Improve onboarding efficiency of new hardware with automated discovery (using 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 operating system templates (bare metal, VMs or containers) to tens of thousands of servers and IoT devices for faster, consistent, and repeatable provisioning and configuration without compromising speed or security.

  • Reduce costs with automated patch management, enabling you to deploy patches based on assigned software channels 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 and 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 third party data center, or in the cloud.

  • Improve visibility of your infrastructure – with improved graphical visualization of your IT system status and their relationships. Once an asset has been on-boarded, you’ll never lose it, even if it goes offline or stops responding. 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 and tag them with additional details (location in the DC, Rack, etc). Locate and store hardware specifics for servers and IoT devices, enabling grouping and tagging by hardware characteristics such as vendor tags, CPU architecture, or RAM.

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

  • Comprehensive monitoring solution that enables operations to monitor your Linux environments from the hardware layer, through the operating system layer, up to their applications.

  • Detailed compliance auditing and reporting with the ability to track all hardware and software changes made to your managed Linux infrastructure.

  • Easily track system compliance with automated patch management, and daily notifications of any 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 or templates based on your own internal security policies.

About SUSE Manager 4.0

SUSE Manager 4.0 is the latest release of SUSE’s best-in-class open source infrastructure management software. It features new enhancements focused on lowering costs, improving DevOps efficiency, and easily managing large or 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 or 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 containing the SUSE Manager Server application and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1 for x86-64, POWER (ppc64le), or IBM Z (s390x).

With the adoption of a unified installer in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, system roles are used to customize the installation for each product. The unified installer 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 on 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. The supported upgrade method is to migrate the data from your SUSE Manager Server 3.2 installation to SUSE Manager Server 4.0.

Note that it is only possible to migrate from SUSE Manager Server 3.2 if it has a PostgreSQL 10 database.

All connected clients will continue to run and remain unchanged.

For detailed upgrading instructions, see the Upgrade Guide on https://opensource.suse.com/doc-susemanager/.

Migrating from Red Hat Satellite

Migrating from Red Hat Satellite to SUSE Manager Server 4.0 is conditionally supported. To perform this migration, we strongly recommend you get in contact with a SUSE sales engineer or consultant before starting the migration.

Scaling SUSE Manager

The default configuration of SUSE Manager will scale around one thousand clients, when deployed according to the instructions in the Installation Guide on https://opensource.suse.com/doc-susemanager/. Scaling beyond that number needs special consideration.

For more information and instructions on large-scale deployments, see https://opensource.suse.com/doc-susemanager/suse-manager/beta3/administration/tuning-largedeploys.html.

Before you begin, you should always get advice from a SUSE partner, sales engineer, or consultant.

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. If this occurs, we recommended that you increase the maximum amount of memory allowed for taskomatic by editing /etc/rhn/rhn.conf and adding this line:

taskomatic.java.maxmemory=4096

You will need to restart taskomatic after this change.

This allows taskomatic 4GB of memory (up from the default of 2GB). If taskomatic continues to run out of memory, you can increase the number further. However, keep in mind that this will affect the total memory required by SUSE Manager Server.

Major changes since SUSE Manager Server 3.2

Prometheus Monitoring

New in SUSE Manager 4.0 we have included the first version of the Monitoring feature. This includes packages for the latest versions of Prometheus and Grafana, as well as monitoring capabilities in SUSE Manager itself.

Prometheus is a monitoring tool that is used to record real-time metrics in a time-series database. For more information, see: https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/

Grafana is a tool for data visualization, monitoring and analysis. It is used to create dashboards with panels representing specific metrics over a set time-frame. For more information, see: https://grafana.com/docs/

Exporters

Exporters are libraries which help in exporting existing metrics from third-party systems as Prometheus metrics. We are now providing the following Prometheus Exporters as packages, for SLE12 and SLE15:

Monitoring features in SUSE Manager

SUSE Manager will be able to provide Prometheus metrics about its self-health. Both Server and Proxy will be capable of exposing metrics and it will be possible to enable/disable Server self-monitoring via the Web UI. For that purpose, some exporters will be pre-installed on SUSE Manager Server and Proxy.

A new formula is also included, to install and manage Node and PostgreSQL exporters on Salt managed clients. This formula can be configured in the SUSE Manager Web UI.

Content lifecycle management

The content lifecycle management feature allows you 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 promote software channels through a pre-defined lifecycle of environments.

You can define filters to exclude specific packages and patches. More filters will be added in a later release.

Once you have selected your 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 build at any time throughout the process.

The result of the build, and the content of every environment, is a channel tree made of cloned software channels of the selected sources, to which systems can be assigned.

Virtualization management for Salt minions

The existing virtualization features have been enhanced for Salt-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 pre-built disk image.

These features have been added:

  • 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

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)

Improve logging for Salt Remote Command Page

The Salt Remote Command Page log now every command executed in a separate logfile (/var/log/rhn/rhn_salt_remote_commands.log). In addition to this, an entry in the System History is generated for every minion where the command was executed.

Salt 2019.2.0

Salt has been upgraded to the 2019.2.0 release.

We intend to regularly upgrade Salt to more recent versions.

For more detail about changes in your manually-created Salt states, see the Salt upstream release notes: 2019.2.

Base system upgrade

The base system was upgraded to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1. As a result, all code was ported to run with Python 3 and OpenJDK 11.

Technical preview: Single Sign-On (SSO)

SUSE Manager supports Single Sign-On authentication by implementing the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2 protocol. Mandatory requirement: an already existing and configured SAML Identity Service Provider (IdP). SUSE Manager must be reconfigured to use the IdP as the source of authentication and post-login mapped users must be already created before enabling SSO. Check "Authentication Methods" in the user’s guide for the step-to-step configuration process.

Upgrading with SUSE Manager Proxy

SUSE Manager Server 4.0 works with SUSE Manager Proxy 3.2. When upgrading, upgrade the Server first, followed by the Proxies.

For instructions on upgrading with Proxies, see the Upgrade Guide on https://opensource.suse.com/doc-susemanager/..

Upgrading with inter-server synchronization

When upgrading, upgrade the ISS master first, followed by the ISS slaves.

Support

Supportconfig confidentiality disclaimer

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

This 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.

When you run supportconfig on the SUSE Manager Server, the output will contain information about your clients as well as about the Server. In particular, debug data for the subscription matching feature contains a list of registered clients, their installed products, and some minimal hardware information (such as the CPU socket count). It also contains a copy of the 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 before sending it to SUSE.

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 older products

The SUSE Manager engineering team provides 'best effort' support for products past their end-of-life date. For more information about product support, see: Product Support Lifecycle.

Support for products that are considered past their end-of-life is limited to assisting you to bring production systems to a supported state. This could be either by migrating to a supported service pack or by upgrading to a supported product version.

spacewalk-utils

All commands need expertise to operate and can potentially create problems with your installation. The spacewalk-utils package is a packaged set of command line tools. We consider the spacewalk-utils tools valuable enough to be included, but are not able to fully support them.

These spacewalk-utils tools are fully supported:

  • spacewalk-clone-by-date

  • spacewalk-sync-setup

  • spacewalk-manage-channel-lifecycle

All other spacewalk-utils tools are supported at L1 level support only. L1 support is limited to problem determination, which means technical support designed to provide compatibility information, usage support, on-going maintenance, information gathering and basic troubleshooting using available documentation.

phantomjs

The phantomjs package is a dependency of Grafana and will be supported only this context.

Providing feedback

If you encounter a bug in any SUSE product, please report it through your support contact.

Resources

Latest product documentation: https://opensource.suse.com/doc-susemanager/

Technical product information for SUSE Manager: http://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager/technical-information

These release notes are available online: http://www.suse.com/releasenotes

Further information about SUSE Manager is available on the Wiki: http://wiki.microfocus.com/index.php/SUSE_Manager

Visit http://www.suse.com for the latest Linux product news from SUSE.

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

Legal Notices

SUSE Linux GmbH
Maxfeldstr. 5
D-90409 Nürnberg
Tel: +49 (0)911 740 53 - 0
Email: feedback@suse.com
Registrierung/Registration Number: HRB 21284 AG Nürnberg
Geschäftsführer/Managing Director: Felix Imendörffer, Mary Higgins, Sri Rasiah
Steuernummer/Sales Tax ID: DE 192 167 791
Erfüllungsort/Legal Venue: Nürnberg

SUSE makes no representations or warranties with regard to the contents or use of this documentation, and specifically disclaims any express or implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose. Further, SUSE reserves the right to revise this publication and to make changes to its content, at any time, without the obligation to notify any person or entity of such revisions or changes.

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.

Any products or technical information provided under this Agreement may be subject to U.S. export controls and the trade laws of other countries. You agree to comply with all export control regulations and to obtain any required licenses or classifications to export, re-export, or import deliverables. You agree not to export or re-export to entities on the current U.S. export exclusion lists or to any embargoed or terrorist countries as specified in U.S. export laws. You agree to not use deliverables for prohibited nuclear, missile, or chemical/biological weaponry end uses. Please refer to the SUSE Legal information page for more information on exporting SUSE software. SUSE assumes no responsibility for your failure to obtain any necessary export approvals.

Copyright © 2012-2019 SUSE LLC.

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/.

SUSE has intellectual property rights relating to technology embodied in the product that is described in this document. In particular, and without limitation, these intellectual property rights may include one or more of the U.S. patents listed at https://www.suse.com/company/legal/ and one or more additional patents or pending patent applications in the U.S. and other countries.

For SUSE trademarks, see SUSE Trademark and Service Mark list (https://www.suse.com/company/legal/). All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Colophon

Thank you for using SUSE Manager Server in your business.

Your SUSE Manager Server Team.