SUSE Adds AI Agents, Hosted Control Planes and SLES 16.1 to Open Infrastructure Platform
SALT LAKE CITY -- SUSE announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 new capabilities across its open infrastructure platform, which unites SUSE Rancher Prime for managing Kubernetes applications and virtual machines, SUSE AI Factory for building and running AI workloads and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 16.1. The updates add agentic AI capabilities for infrastructure management along with expanded support for immutable infrastructure, real-time performance and security.
AI Crew Agents for Kubernetes and VM Troubleshooting
SUSE Rancher Prime expands its AI-assisted management with Liz, its context-aware AI orchestrator, and a new AI Crew of specialized sub-agents that help teams diagnose issues, troubleshoot workloads and manage infrastructure. Integration with SUSE Virtualization extends those capabilities to virtual machines. New OAuth2 support lets Liz connect with Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, an AI-first Rancher CLI adds server-side dry-run capabilities and SUSE Observability StackPacks 2.0 expands visibility for troubleshooting. AI-driven actions include human approval steps.
On the platform side, SUSE Rancher Prime Virtual Clusters now supports Hosted Control Plane mode, allowing platform teams to offer Kubernetes as a service with RKE2. The SUSE Storage v2 data engine delivers up to 10 times faster performance for stateful workloads, SUSE Virtualization adds advanced networking with Kube-OVN for overlay networking and tenant isolation, and native Cluster API infrastructure providers for RKE2 are now available. SLES 16.1 consolidates traditional, immutable and real-time workloads under one operating system and introduces an on-box MCP framework in tech preview. For supply chain security, SUSE Application Collection now includes more than 1,000 Python libraries built from verified sources with software bills of materials (SBOMs) and provenance data, and the upcoming SUSE Security 6.0 will add a vulnerability scanner and a runtime enforcer that detects and blocks anomalous workload behavior.
“As enterprises move from experimenting with AI to deploying it at scale, they need infrastructure that can support new workloads alongside existing applications without compromising security, performance, or control,” said Thomas Di Giacomo, chief technology and product officer at SUSE. SLES 16.1 is available now, with SUSE Rancher Prime enhancements arriving on their respective release schedules. The AI-first Rancher CLI and Virtual Clusters Hosted Control Plane mode are in open beta.
