New Linux Milestone With Suse SLES 15 SP2

The majority of SAP customers didn’t take much note of SAP’s 1999 announcement that SAP R/3 had now also been made available to run on operating system Linux. Despite the establishment of an SAP Linux Lab, Linux was a wallflower in the SAP community. And why should customers have opted for Linux, if they had already installed other ‘operating systems’, like IBM AIX, HP-UX, OS/400, and Windows, that worked just fine? Back then, SAP even still supported a combination of HP 3000 machines and operating system MPE for R/3.

However, Linux won out. Thanks to valiant efforts by SAP and partners like Suse, customers were able to see the benefits that highly efficient and optimized Linux systems have for mission-critical SAP systems.

Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP Applications 15 SP2 is the most recent version of the Linux operating system. With the new release, Suse deployments/transitions for business-critical workloads and applications have been made available for public cloud environments. Furthermore, major release 15 is the first version to take multi-modal principles into consideration. The goal is to create the foundation for a uniform code basis for traditional infrastructures, software-defined infrastructures (SDI), and application-focused architectures.

SLES for SAP Applications 15 also combines containerized and traditional development environments including the combination of legacy applications and microservices.

What Suse SLES 15 SP2 can do

The new version 15 SP2 is available for on-premises and public cloud deployment based on a uniform code basis. Benefits include higher levels of automation and optimized monitoring to reduce downtimes and recovery times and increase availability of Hana-based and NetWeaver-based applications. The enterprise OS has been optimized for server architectures like x86_64, ARMv7, ARMv8 as well as IBM Power, IBM Z Systems and the LinuxOne platform.

Automation is integral to components that can be called up from different frontends like Terraform, YaST, or Suse Manager. By the way, more and more SAP customers are opting for Suse Manager as management software combined with SLES for SAP Applications.

A focal point in the development of SLES for SAP Applications 15 SP2 has been optimizing public cloud deployment. The new version now has mechanisms to seamlessly install, configure and operate (large) SAP environments in the cloud. Here, Terraform and Salt are the most prevalent.

Consequently, entire S/4 Hana software stacks including high availability functionalities can be configured in only a short amount of time, which all S/4 customers, on premises and in the cloud, can benefit from.