[ad_1]
Germany-based Linux company SUSE has released SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3, the first SLE release in nearly a year. Editions are available for AMD / Intel x86-64, IBM Z, IBM POWER and Arm64 architectures.
With this release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3, SLE and the openSUSE Leap community distribution look more like twins than brothers.
Until now, Leap was based on SLE, but was more of an upstream version. With this release, both distributions actually share the same binary code, the only difference being that some copyright and trademark notices have been removed from Leap. This makes the community-driven Leap a free replacement for SLE, in the same way that CentOS was a replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux – except CentOS never shared the same binary and was a completely separate distribution.
Due to this closer kinship, in the future, new releases of SLE and Leap will take place on the same day rather than on independent schedules.
Naming Note: SUSE uses a “service pack” based version control system similar to Windows, which means that this version would match version 15.3 under a conventional Linux naming. SLE forms the basis for all commercial SUSE products, including SUSE Enterprise Linux Server and SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop.
“SUSE Linux Enterprise has a common code base that runs on many of your architectures, containers, and edge devices, providing the same computing experience, security, and stability over that mixed infrastructure, so that you can streamline IT skills and systems management and simplify support and services, â€said Jeff Reser, director of product and solutions marketing for SUSE, in a blog announcing the release.
This compatibility allows DevOps teams to use Leap for non-critical workloads and only purchase SLE licenses for servers running in production.
“The goal is to make it easy for our customers to deploy a very large number of openSUSE Leap instances across the organization, and use them for development or testing,†said Sheng Liang, president of the Engineering and Innovation from SUSE, at ITPro Today. “As they prepare for critical production use, they can now sign up for a business relationship with SUSE.
“It’s very different from the way our competitors do it,†he added. “They seem to really want to separate the open source binary from the commercial binary. We’re taking the opposite approach sort of.”
SLE and OpenSUSE Leap compatibility in the cloud
Compatibility can also be used in the cloud, as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform offer both SLE and openSUSE Leap in their markets.
“SUSE continues to drive innovation with Google Cloud in the open source community,†said Nelly Porter, group product manager at Google Cloud, in a statement. “Now our customers can test their workloads using openSUSE Leap and then deploy a fully supported SUSE Linux Enterprise Confidential VM into production, thanks to binary compatibility introduced with SLES 15 SP3. This capability, provided through close collaboration with OS partners, makes cloud adoption more cost effective for our customers. “
On-premises, it also means that if a non-critical workload suddenly becomes critical, the upgrade path only requires purchasing a license, with no need to install a new operating system.
As Gerald Pfeifer, CTO of SUSE’s EMEA zone, told our partner site, Data Center Knowledge, when binary compatibility in SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 was first announced in March: “It’s like Harry Potter with a magic wand. Abracadabra and now you are SUSE Linux Enterprise. “
SUSE’s other community Linux distribution, openSUSE Tumbleweed, is an evolving version that is constantly updated and is not binary compatible with SLE.
Material optimization
The new version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 also ships with increased hardware support; hardware activation and optimizations for AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon, Arm and Fujitsu processors; and software accelerations with NVIDIA compute module, CUDA and enhanced virtual GPU support. SUSE has also released a new performance tuning guide for SLES on Gen 3 AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors which was released in March.
“The performance improvements and advanced security of SUSE Linux Enterprise are important to enterprises and cloud providers, where performance and time to value are critical to support ‘innovate anywhere’ environments,†said Reser.
[ad_2]
