SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 and Dell PowerEdge Servers

This blog is originally written by Smitha Honnayakanaha and Gobind Vijayakumar from Dell OS Engineering Team

We are thrilled to announce the availability of SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 on DELL PowerEdge Servers. In November last year SUSE has announced the availability of their next major distribution release SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES 12). 

With an extensive set of platform enablement and a comprehensive testing with all relevant drivers, SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 delivers a superior customer experience on DELL PowerEdge Servers. SLES 12 is based on upstream Linux 3.12 kernel and OpenSUSE 13 and later. SLES 12 includes driver updates, bug fixes and support for new hardware, refer to SLES 12 Release Notes for more info. 

SLES 12 has been extensively validated on all supported Dell PowerEdge servers.

With Dell and SUSE Enterprise Linux 12, here are some of the hardware enablement features that will interest you to install SLES 12 on DELL PowerEdge Servers

• Intel Haswell EP Processor support
• Intel Avoton Processor support
• Support for Dell PERC 9 storage controllers
• Support for PCIe SSD and NVMe

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 introduces a number of innovative changes. Here are some of the highlights: Made for Cloud

• Robustness on administrative errors and improved management capabilities with full system rollback based on btrfs as the default file system for the operating system partition and SUSE's snapper technology
• An overhaul of the installer introduces a new workflow that allows you to register your system and receive all available maintenance updates as part of the installation
• New core technologies like systemd (replacing the time honored System V based init process) and wicked (introducing a modern, dynamic network configuration infrastructure)
• Support for the open-vm-tools together with VMware for better integration into VMware based hypervisor environments
• Linux Containers are integrated into the virtualization management infrastructure (lib-virt). Docker is provided as a technology preview

For a full list of features introduced with SLES 12, refer link

SLES 12 DELL Offerings

• With SLES 12 RTS from DELL, SLES 12  is Factory-Installed (FI) and DIB (Drop-In-Box) supported on 11G, 12G and 13G servers
• DELL Systems Management OpenManage (OM) 8.1 is the supported OM version for SLES 12 on Power Edge Servers

Certification Highlights

• SUSE Enterprise Linux 12 has been released to general availability (GA) and with this announcement we are eager to reveal the list of Dell Server that will support this new release. These servers have under gone rigorous testing and support most of the SLES 12 features
• Below is the list of our 11^th, 12^th and 13^th Generation servers that officially supports SUSE Enterprise Linux 12

Dell PowerEdge Servers

PowerEdge-C

References –

1. SuSE Support – http://www.suse.com/products/server/services-and-support/
2. Link to YES Certified Dell Servers – http://tinyurl.com/ka4yfc8