Release notes for SUSE Manager 3 Server

Version 3.0.0
Tuesday July 12, 2016



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Version Revision History

About SUSE Manager

You have more than just a few Linux servers to manage, maybe even a mixed environment of RHEL and SLES?

Then SUSE Manager is the answer.

SUSE Manager gives you best of breed Linux lifecycle management based on the most mature codebase for any Linux management tool, with both RHEL and SLES support from one unified console, maintained and improved by the guys who wrote the fastest and most advanced Linux update stack on the planet.

SUSE Manager gives you the lowest possible Total Cost of Ownership for your Linux environment, from bare metal provisioning to daily patch management. SUSE Manager is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution that allows you to:

Stay up-to-date

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

Installation

Requirements and registration code

SUSE Manager 3 Server is an extension for SLES 12 SP1 x86_64 or s390x.

This means that, unlike SUSE Manager 2.1 Server, installation is done in two steps

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

Attention Your SUSE Manager Server registration code is valid for the base operating system as well as the SUSE Manager 3 extension.

Installing the SUSE Manager 3 Server extension on SLES 12 SP1

You'll need a physical or virtual SLES 12 SP1 x86_64 or s390x system to install SUSE Manager 3.

When you install and register SLES 12 SP1, SUSE Manager 3 Server will show up in the list of available extensions.

You'll need a SUSE Manager Server registration code to access this extension.

Update from previous versions of SUSE Manager Server

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

Upgrade from SUSE Manager 2.1 Server to SUSE Manager 3 Server is done by choosing the 2.1 Server as a migration source when running ``yast2 susemanager_setup``

See this wiki page for a detailed description of the required steps.

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

Note that the SUSE Manager 2.1 Server needs to have PostgreSQL as its database.

Update from SUSE Manager 2.1 with Oracle Database

Data migration from SUSE Manager 2.1 with Oracle Database is not possible.

You need to first migrate from Oracle to PostgreSQL database as outlined in the SUSE Manager 2.1 Server documentation.

Migrating from RHN Satellite

Is conditionally supported with SUSE Manager 3 Server.

If you have the need to migrate from RHN Satellite to SUSE Manager 3, please get in contact with a SUSE sales engineer or a SUSE consultant before starting the migration.

Major changes since SUSE Manager Server 3 GA

Features and changes

taskotop

spacewalk-utils now contains taskotop, a command line tool to visualize the taskomatic schedule.

New products supported

Patches

The SUSE Patch Finder is a simple online service to view released patches.

Patch 986: SUSE Manager Server 3.0

This update fixes the following issues:

salt:

Patch 984: SUSE Manager Server, Proxy and Client Tools

This update fixes the following issues for the SUSE Manager Server 3.0 and Client Tools:

zypp-plugin-spacewalk:

Patch 822: salt

This update for salt contains the following:

New features since SUSE Manager Server 2.1

Spacewalk 2.4

SUSE Manager 3 Server is based on Spacewalk 2.4 with many new features added by SUSE.

New documentation

The SUSE Manager 3 documentation was rewritten from scratch and is not derived from the upstream Spacewalk documentation any more.

SUSE Manager 3 comes with four manuals

All manuals will see regular updates and will be available online at www.suse.com.

Subscription Matching

SUSE Manager 3 Server removed all entitlement counting code and instead ships with subscription matching abilities. This is implemented in two parts:

The subscription matcher uses the subscription information from SUSE Customer Center and automatically matches those to known hosts.

A pre-requirement to match subscriptions to systems is to have complete information about which virtual system runs on which virtual host. See topology awareness below on how to have SUSE Manager 3 Server gather this information.

The result is stored in /var/lib/spacewalk/subscription-matcher as CSV files. A web UI will be added later.

See the SUSE Manager Reference Manual for further details about subscription matching.

Topology awareness

The tool virtual-host-gatherer is used to collect data about virtual machines running on virtual hosts.

This creates a topology mesh used by the subscription matcher.

See the SUSE Manager Reference Manual for further details about virtual-host-gatherer

Configuration management

Configuration management is about to see the biggest impact when moving from SUSE Manager 2.1 Server to SUSE Manager 3 Server as it changes from an imperative to a declarative model.

Instead of "install package X at this time", it's now "ensure package X is installed from this time on".

SUSE Manager 3 Server uses Salt from SaltStack Inc. as the client-side agent.

See the SaltStack walk-through for a quick introduction to Salt.

The traditional client stack (aka rhnsd) is still fully supported but deprecated. You do not need to make any changes to existing clients when moving from SUSE Manager 2.1 Server to SUSE Manager 3 Server.

Salt integration

SUSE Manager 3 Server comes with a preconfigured salt-master based on the official 2015.8.7 release.

Any system able to run a salt-minion can be connected to SUSE Manager 3 Server as a managed client.

Initially only SLES 11 SP4, SLES 12 GA, and SLES 12 SP1 clients are supported.

Salt vs. Traditional clients

Salt API support

SUSE Manager 3 Server provides and supports the Salt API as-is. This API will follow upstream Salt and might change at any time as Salt gets updated.

Package downloads changed

Package downloads are now using a new implementation which should have far less overhead for the SUSE Manager Server.

Package downloads itself will not be faster, but should scale better. Feedback welcome !

Monitoring dropped

The monitoring component of SUSE Manager Server has been dropped. Instead a lightweight integration with Icinga is planned.

A fully supported Icinga package for SLES 12 is available via the SUSE Manager Tools channel.

No support for Oracle database

SUSE Manager 3 Server does not initally support Oracle as a database backend.

Existing SUSE Manager 2.1 Server deployments with Oracle should be migrated to PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL has similar functionality and performance characteristics as Oracle but uses dramatically fewer resources.

Going forward, we will focus on PostgreSQL for all scalability and performance improvements.

Extension for SLES 12 SP1

SUSE Manager is no longer an appliance but now an extension on top of SLES 12 SP1 x86_64 or s390x and available via SUSE Customer Center

This means you can set up the base operating system according to your needs and requirements. SUSE Manager 3 will add all required packages automatically during installation.

All storage setup (esp. for /var/lib/pgsql and /var/spacewalk) should be done before installation of SUSE Manager 3 Server.

Other changes since 2.1

Upgrade of Inter Server Sync setups

In ISS (Inter Server Sync) setups, upgrade all slaves to 3 before upgrading the master.

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.

Red Hat Channels

Managing Red Hat clients requires availability of appropriate Red Hat packages. These are not available through the SUSE Customer Center (SCC) but must be provided by other means, e.g. from a retired Red Hat Satellite installation.

Support for SLES 10 based systems

The SUSE Manager client stack for SLES10 based systems is identical to the one used on SLES11 based systems. SLES 10 systems managed by SUSE Manager will have the ZENworks Managemen Daemon (ZMD) and the rug command line tool removed.

Salt is not available for SLES 10.

SUSE Manager Proxy versions

SUSE Manager 3 Server can work with version 2.1 of SUSE Manager Proxy.

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:

Known bugs

Upstream changes since SUSE Manager 2.1

Note: Changes from the upstream project are listed here as-is. There's no guarantee that all of them are actually available in SUSE Manager 3 Server.

Spacewalk 2.4

Spacewalk 2.3

Spacewalk 2.2

Providing feedback to our products

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

Documentation and other information

http://www.suse.com/products/suse-manager/technical-information/contains additional or updated documentation for SUSE Manager Server 2.1.

These Release Notes are available online at http://www.suse.com/documentation/releasenotes. Further information about SUSE Manager is available at http://wiki.novell.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.

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Thank you for using SUSE Manager Server in your business.

Your SUSE Manager Server Team.