AMSTERDAM, March 24, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- KubeCon Europe -- SUSE, a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, today announces updates that transition container management into automated infrastructure operations. SUSE Rancher Prime now includes an open ecosystem for AI agents, providing enterprises with new automated operational tools. Additionally, SUSE Virtualization serves as a stable foundation for modernizing legacy infrastructure and further unifies VM and container management.
“Our open approach to AI and the unification of VM and container management allows customers to capitalize on the potential of AI and redefine their own operational simplicity, ultimately giving them flexibility, choice and control,” said Peter Smails, general manager, Cloud Native, SUSE. “SUSE’s mission is to be the open infrastructure platform for modern workloads and today’s updates significantly advance our strategy.”
“The software-defined compute market is undergoing significant change as enterprises look to modernize infrastructure amidst disruption in the traditional virtualization market,” said Gary Chen, Research Director, Software-Defined Compute, IDC. “While containers are the new standard for AI and modern workloads, virtual machines remain essential to the enterprise footprint. Infrastructure platforms that can unify these environments while providing automated, AI-driven operational tools will be key to helping organizations navigate this transition and achieve greater operational efficiency.”
AI Native Operations
Building on its existing management foundation, the latest updates expand SUSE Rancher Prime as the central management layer across an organization’s complete infrastructure stack, providing deeper integration and control across hybrid environments.
Key additions include:
- Infrastructure-Specific AI Orchestration: Liz, a context-aware AI agent integrated into SUSE Rancher Prime, now coordinates a group of specialized agents. These agents provide Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and operations teams with automated insights across their entire environment.
- First open agentic AI ecosystem: By extending to third-party software via Model Context Protocol (MCP), Liz allows organizations to connect external services without custom code. This ecosystem enables Liz to retrieve and process data from third-party tools directly without needing integration.
Unifying VM and Container Management
As an open alternative to proprietary hypervisors, the latest SUSE Virtualization includes:
- NVIDIA MIG (Multi-Instance GPU) support: This brings enterprise-grade GPU partitioning to SUSE Virtualization, increasing hardware efficiency for AI workloads.
- Advanced Operational Tools: The release adds VM Auto Balance for automated workload distribution, Live Storage Migration for moving data without downtime, and granular upgrade controls.
Empowering Developers with Secure AI Access
As part of SUSE Rancher Developer Access, SUSE Rancher Prime now includes expanded capabilities designed to streamline the path from development to production-ready.
Key updates include:
- Shift left security for supply chains: To help organizations jumpstart their modernization journey, SUSE offers immediate access to part of its curated catalog of over 140 hardened, enterprise-ready applications, including Base Container Images, PostgreSQL, Redis and Penpot. This enables the broader developer community to build more secure applications with selected and trusted base images.
- Maximizing GPU Utilization via Virtual Cluster Multi-Tenancy: Newly introduced Virtual Clusters provides developers with a "sandbox" experience at scale. Teams can now provision fully isolated, self-service Kubernetes control planes, allowing them to experiment with AI models and complex workloads in a high-velocity environment without impacting the broader organization or competing for shared GPU resources.
Availability
SUSE Rancher Prime's AI capabilities are live now, with AI Assistant enhancements in General Availability. SUSE Virtualization with NVIDIA MIG multi-tenancy and Upgrade control are also available now, with VM Auto Balancing and Live Storage Migration in Early Access. Virtual Clusters are production-ready and generally available.
About SUSE
SUSE is a global leader in enterprise open source software, across Linux operating systems, Kubernetes container management, Edge solutions and AI. The majority of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to provide resilient infrastructure, enabling IT leaders to optimize cost and manage heterogeneous environments. SUSE collaborates with partners and communities to provide organizations with choices to maximize their current IT systems and innovate with next-generation technologies across traditional on-premises, to cloud native, multi-cloud to edge and beyond. For more information, visit www.suse.com.
Contact:
sara.matheson@suse.com
