In late 2020, SUSE closed their acquisition of open source Kubernetes management platform Rancher, with the idea of creating a broad best-in-class Linux operating system. From the SUSE point of view, SUSE Rancher offered the ability to help SUSE meet its very aggressive growth goals. For Rancher, one of the benefits of being acquired was the ability to take advantage of SUSE’s extensive ecosystem. At the HPE Discover 2022 event, while a major extension of the core SUSE-HPE partnership was announced, a SUSE Rancher focused partnership was announced between SUSE and HPE.

“The announcement that we made at HPE Discover had four parts to it,” said Bob Fidrych, Global Alliance Director, HPE, with SUSE.

The first part was a public reaffirmation of something that had already been in operation.

“GreenLake as-a-Service will all be run in the SUSE Linux control plane,” Fidrych said. “This is a formalization of something that had been there before.” HPE will also use SUSE Linux Enterprise as the OS in the GreenLake control plane for all GreenLake as-a-Service offerings.

The second part of the announcement is that HPE has adopted SUSE Rancher K3S as their container of choice for GreenLake as-a-Service delivery,” Fidrych said. HPE edge devices will be managed using SUSE Rancher Fleet Manager, a component of SUSE Rancher Management Server.

“HPE and SUSE are putting a lot into the edge, and are doing this with Linux and SUSE Rancher,” Fidrych said.

Third is the expansion of the engineering relationship between the companies.

“SUSE and HPE will also be doing a lot of joint engineering around security, including HPE’s Project Aurora, and the joint root of trust of SKES and SLE Micro on HPE Fidrych said. This will include jointly building out FIPS certifications for SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE Rancher.

“SUSE has unique partnerships with all vendors but our engineering relationship with HPE is extremely close and has been for an extremely long time,” Fidrych added.

The final component of the announcement is that both SUSE Rancher and SLES Micro SKUs will be added to the HPE OEM price list in October. SLES Micro is an edge use case product, which has a smaller footprint than SUSE Linux version Enterprise.

“This also means that HPE PointNext will sell it,” Fidrych said. “This is a big deal because PointNext is developing a lot of services around GreenLake and will now be doing so for SUSE Rancher.”