SUSE announces new enhancements to help users manage business-critical workloads

SUSE announced enhancements across its cloud native and Edge portfolio to enable customers to securely deploy and manage business-critical workloads anywhere.

New capabilities in Rancher Prime 3.0, SUSE’s commercial offering of Rancher and SUSE Edge 3.0 commit to enabling choice and providing secure platforms through 100 percent open source solutions.

“At SUSE, our commercial and open source users are equally important,” said Peter Smails, GM of the SUSE Enterprise Container Management business unit. “As such, our mission is two-fold; we need to deliver the capabilities our enterprise customers require in order to deploy and manage their business critical production workloads, while also continuing to invest in innovation to support and grow our huge community of open source users. This announcement speaks to both.”

Security and lifecycle management, enabling self-service PaaS with Rancher Prime

New capabilities in Rancher Prime 3.0 help platform engineering teams deliver self-service Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to their developer communities, and enhanced support for AI workloads.

New Rancher Prime 3.0 enhancements include:

• Enhanced secure software supply chain with SLSA certification and software bill-of-materials (SBOM) provides the trusted delivery enterprises need.
• Updated software lifecycle management delivers consistent, repeatable releases closely aligned with upstream Kubernetes lifecycle.
• General availability of Cluster API and new Cluster Classes enables platform engineering teams to deliver self-service PaaS, allowing them to scale with automation and accelerate code-to-production.
• General availability of the Rancher Prime Application Collection delivers open source applications through a single, trusted, enterprise-grade distribution platform.
• Certified Kubernetes distributions RKE2 and K3s have been enhanced to automatically detect/configure the use of NVIDIA’s container runtimes simplifying the deployment of AI/ML workloads.

SUSE is also introducing Rancher Enterprise, a single package and price for the entire portfolio of Rancher Prime including multi-cluster management, OS management, VM management, persistent storage, and SUSE’s certified Linux OS, SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro.

Continued investment in open source innovation and community

SUSE continues to invest in open source innovation across its entire cloud native portfolio to support its large community of users. Key enhancements include:

• Harvester 1.3.0: GPU cards support creation of virtual GPUs (vGPUs) allowing users to assign a vGPU to one or more VMs created by Harvester and Arm support in technical preview is now available.
• Longhorn 1.6.0: The latest update to the Data Engine Version 2.0 technical preview enables seamless performance volume backup and restoration of operations between version one and two data engines.
• RKE2 and K3s: NVIDIA GPU support and full Arm support have reached general availability.
• NeuVector Prime 5.3.0: New features include egress network connection visibility and GitOps automation and expanded support for arm64 architectures.

SUSE Edge 3.0 extends the power of open source to the edge

Customer demands to deliver superior edge experiences are increasing rapidly. According to IDC, 25% of enterprise infrastructure spending will be for edge. SUSE Edge 3.0 is addressing these growing demands by delivering a highly validated, integrated, edge optimized stack.

“Edge is the next frontier of innovation, but many organizations face challenges – knowledge of how to deploy at this scale to resource constraints to technical debt – in accelerating transformation at the edge,” said Keith Basil, GM of SUSE Edge business unit. “Edge is essentially about pushing business value and compute power to where the customers and the data are, where it does the best good. SUSE Edge 3.0 is what teams need to deploy edge securely, confidently and at scale, ultimately helping them grow and sustain their competitive advantage.”

Purpose-built for the edge on SUSE’s 100 percent open source foundation, SUSE Edge 3.0 offers:

• Fully integrated, cloud native edge platform: Increase efficiency across your edge infrastructure.
• Enterprise-grade security: Full platform, data center-grade security to every edge device, wherever it is located.
• Scalability: Easily deploy and manage edge infrastructure, from hundreds to tens of thousands of nodes.

“Rancher Prime lets us manage everything that is underneath, all the way down to bare metal, or the edge. There are a number of other solutions out there, some of which may be better on specific parts of the chain, but SUSE Edge is providing the full chain,” said Hans Zenth, Technical Project Manager, R&D at Danelec. “It has actually been a benefit that this is a one-stop shop. It’s only SUSE taking full responsibility for the entire chain.”

Rancher Prime 3.0 and SUSE Edge 3.0 will be generally available in April 2024.