Europe’s top enterprise Linux distro is promising unmatched longevity and security with its newest release. 

SUSE has officially released SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Service Pack 7 (SLES 15 SP7), positioning it as a strategic “safe harbor” for enterprise IT investments, with support extending until 2037. That’s just shy of the 2038 Linux epoch ends time when Unix/Linux time ends at 03:14:07 on January 19, 2038. I suspect most of us will have updated our server Linux distros by then. I certainly hope so anyway!  

Specifically, SLES 15 SP7 delivers general support until July 31, 2031, followed up by Long Term Service Support (LTSS) until July 31, 2034. General and LTSS support cover both Linux and all its other bundled software. LTSS Core provides support, patches and maintenance for SLES’s core system components, such as the Linux kernel and critical libraries, until December 2037.  

By that time, all the new chipsets that SLES 17 SP7 supports, like the latest Intel (Birch Stream, Arrow Lake, Granite Rapids-WS), AMD (Zen 5, EPYC “Turin”, MI350, MI300X) and IBM Z16 platforms will be as obsolete as 486 processors are today.  

Simultaneously, though, SUSE promises you won’t need any further minor service packages going forward. This means you can remain on SP7 without being forced to move to subsequent service packs or perform disruptive minor upgrades all the way until the end of 2037.  

As before, this version of SLES also supports live patching for both kernel and key userspace libraries. By using SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, which is based on the open-source kGraft project, live patching minimizes time wasted on software maintenance. 

Last but never least, the SUSE SolidDriver Program provides a standard for hardware vendors to deliver kernel drivers in a uniform, consistent way to make updating drivers simple and straightforward.  

SUSE also promises that with this release, you’ll be secure well into the future with such security features as post-quantum cryptography with enhanced OpenSSL 3.2, stricter protocol parsing and improved cryptographic validation. This foundational upgrade enables quantum-safe TLS 1.3 and Quick UDP Internet Connections (QUIC) support across SLES’s network stack. 

The release also strengthens zero-trust security with encrypted memory support for confidential computing. This will only work, however, on processors that support confidential computing with Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).  These CPUs include Intel Granite Rapids and AMD  EPYC “Turin” (Zen 5).  

As you’d expect, SUSE has also delivered the latest toolchains: GCC 14, Python 3.13, PHP 8.3, Node.js 22, OpenJDK 21 and updated Go and Rust versions. Under it all, you’ll find the Linux 6.4 kernel series. 

As a former SysAdmin, who still runs his own servers, I found the new SLES’s Systems Management module, which uses both Salt, SUSE’s long-standing orchestration and configuration management tool, as well as its SUSE-supported Ansible stack, are especially interesting. You can use either Salt or Ansible independently, or leverage both in parallel, depending on your automation needs and existing investments in playbooks or states. 

SUSE’s integration goes further with Salt’s Ansiblegate module, which allows Salt to execute Ansible modules and playbooks directly. This means sysadmins can reuse existing Ansible automation within Salt-driven workflows, combining Salt’s event-driven orchestration and monitoring with Ansible’s task execution.  

If you’re running a hybrid Linux environment with multiple distros, you can also use these. SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, formerly SUSE Manager, can orchestrate both Salt and Ansible automation across system fleets. For example, you could manage your SLES instances with Salt and your Rocky Linux servers with Ansible. 

Finally, if you like the idea of immutable images, the new SLES fully supports long-term maintained base container images (SLE BCI) that can be used to build and deploy immutable application containers. These images are designed for security, flexibility and redistribution across different environments, including cloud, edge and on-premises systems. 

Put it all together, and of SLES 15 SP7, SUSE states that it “isn’t just ready for the next upgrade – it’s ready for the next decade.” They’re not wrong. This new SLES really looks like an enterprise Linux distro you can rely on both today, tomorrow and for years afterwards.