AI continues to dominate enterprise IT vendor conversations, and platform vendors are updating their Linux and Kubernetes products around it, including at this week’s KubeCon in Salt Lake City, Utah.
SUSE is updating its flagship Linux distribution, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), to version 16.1. The new SLES merges standard and immutable operation into one OS with a shared lifecycle and support model. The Kubernetes-based Rancher Prime container management platform benefits from a long list of improvements, including a new hosted control plane, plus storage, networking, security and virtualization updates.
The Liz AI assistant, which helps enterprises manage Rancher Prime infrastructure, is also expanding with additional capabilities, including VM support and more AI model options.
While AI is the workload drawing the most attention, it runs alongside the VMs and containers organizations already manage.
“It’s like the mother of all workloads, but it’s not the only conversation,” Peter Smails, senior vice president and general manager of cloud native at SUSE, told TechTarget.
SLES 16.1 runs standard and immutable Linux from one codebase
At the foundation of everything SUSE does is Linux and its flagship commercial OS, SLES.
SLES 16.1 now merges the traditional package-based SLES with the immutable version, SLE Micro. Standard mode is the traditional approach. Administrators update the OS through package management. Immutable mode applies updates transactionally as whole changes that users can rollback. SUSE aims the offering at edge and distributed workloads.
“What we’ve done with 16.1 is essentially created a model where now within the same codebase you essentially have an install time choice,” Smails said.
SLES 16.1 also puts real-time workloads under the same lifecycle and support. Other additions are expanded live patching, post-quantum cryptography readiness and software supply chain verification.
“People want unification, people want consolidation,” Smails said.
What’s new in Rancher Prime
The Rancher Prime updates cover a lot of ground, including clusters, storage, networking and security tooling.
“It’s all about being able to compute wherever in a secure, scalable way,” Smails said.
Among the Rancher Prime updates are:
Hosted control plane for Virtual Clusters. Virtual Clusters now support a hosted control plane mode for multi-tenancy. One control plane can manage all the tenants, such as clusters running RKE2, SUSE’s Kubernetes distribution. “That’s a density play, as you can imagine,” Smails said. The capability is in beta, he said.
Longhorn V2 data engine. SUSE claims that Longhorn V2, now generally available, provides increased performance over prior versions.
Networking microsegmentation. SUSE is using the Kube-OVN project to deliver network microsegmentation for SUSE Virtualization.
Cluster API providers for RKE2. SUSE has opened RKE2 through native Cluster API (CAPI) support. Operators building a neocloud can plug in their own provisioning engine and manage the result in the Rancher UI. “It’s all about more and more infrastructure flexibility, ecosystem flexibility. And that’s all native, open CAPI,” Smails said.
SUSE Security. SUSE added a vulnerability scanner that checks images for problems and notifies teams so they can fix them. A runtime enforcer covers what the scanner misses. SUSE is contributing both tools to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as part of the Kubewarden project.
Liz AI assistant. The Liz AI assistant can call on sub-agents for tasks such as fleet provisioning, security or observability. Liz now extends to VMs through SUSE Virtualization integration. Users can also select a model for each sub-agent.
The AI agent is table stakes for a platform vendor, but it has some differentiation, according to analysts.
“The part that matters is letting each sub-agent run its own model, whether public, sovereign or custom,” said Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for CIO and technology buyers at The Futurum Group. “That gives buyers control over token spend and where their data goes.”
Other analysts agreed, for the most part.
“With Liz, it’s better than par for the course because SUSE stands out in openness and reach, but has to prove itself to customers by running safely in production,” Larry Carvalho, principal consultant at RobustCloud, told TechTarget.
Governance and guardrails: The analyst view
Governance and guardrails are critical elements of running any workload in production, especially AI.
“SUSE’s claim to fame is their unopinionated approach toward building a platform that is also easy to deploy to and operate,” said Torsten Volk, principal analyst for application modernization at Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget.
Volk noted that without that opinion, it’s hard for organizations to deploy platforms, as the cloud-native and now the AI world have a large number of moving parts that quickly lead to unmanageable, unique application stacks. “AI workloads need a governed platform underneath them, and SUSE is building governance and security into the layer platform teams already run,” Ashley said.
Stacking up SUSE vs. Red Hat
SUSE’s historical Linux rival is also busy this week, updating its platforms for the growing needs of AI on Kubernetes.
Like SUSE, Red Hat announced new versions of its flagship Linux platform, with the debut of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.3 and 9.9. The RHEL updates integrate AI-assisted troubleshooting that can be accessed via the Model Context Protocol, which can help administrators investigate performance and configuration issues affecting AI deployments. Red Hat also launched its OpenShift 5 Kubernetes platform, which, like SUSE Rancher Prime, helps to enable VMs, containers and AI on the same platform. Likewise, Red Hat’s OpenShift Lightspeed is the company’s answer to SUSE Liz, providing agentic AI capabilities that help operations teams investigate cluster issues and assess upgrade readiness.
While technically the two vendors are heading in the same direction in terms of capabilities, there are some critical differences. According to Volk, the real difference is in the approach.
“Red Hat sells an integrated stack of RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible and Red Hat AI, which is now also the foundation of IBM’s Sovereign Core,” Volk said. “SUSE’s pitch is that every layer stays replaceable.”
Volk noted that SUSE’s Rancher manages other vendors’ Kubernetes distributions, and its CAPI support lets GPU cloud providers connect their own clusters.
“That matters because respondents to our Omdia survey expect GPU-specialized AI clouds to hold 21% of their GPU capacity in two years, up from 18% today,” Volk said.
The other big issue is that of sovereignty. According to Ashley, there are similarities across the two vendors but each comes to sovereignty differently. He noted that SUSE moved first on EU sovereignty, and Red Hat followed with its own EU-only support offering a year ago.
“Sovereignty is now the price of entry for European buyers,” Ashley said. “Neither company has shared numbers that show who is winning those deals, so watch renewals in regulated industries over the next year.”
For Volk, there is still at least one big difference when it comes to sovereignty.
“The one thing Red Hat cannot copy is ownership. SUSE is a European company, while Red Hat belongs to IBM,” he said. “For some government and regulated buyers, that question alone decides the shortlist.”
Sean Michael Kerner is an IT consultant, technology enthusiast and tinkerer. He has pulled Token Ring, configured NetWare and been known to compile his own Linux kernel. He consults with industry and media organizations on technology issues.
