Eight easy steps to SUSE Manager 3: With JeOS!

In the title of my post about what’s new in SUSE Manager 3 I implied that the new release was “sweet and salty”. Now, the “salty” part is easy, because SUSE Manager 3 comes with Salt included. But why “sweet”? Because I suggest taking some JeOS (pronounce “juice”) with your Manager 3. 😉

You may have noticed that on the SUSE Manager 3 download pages we are actually pointing you to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 media. That’s because SUSE Manager 3 is installed as an add-on on top of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). A lot of our customers asked for that.

To get started, you just need that media and a registration code for SUSE Manager Server that will also work for the SLES you are using for your SUSE Manager. If you use that code to register your server, it will give you access to SUSE Manager Server directly from the installation dialog:

So with every new installation you are automatically going to get the latest and greatest updates of SUSE Manager 3.

If you prefer not to install software directly off the SUSE Customer Center, of course you can leverage an existing Subscription Management Tool (SMT) instance or install one on premise. SMT is now part of SLES 12 SP2, which means that it’s just a click away in YaST.

You can then use the SMT to mirror both the SLES and SUSE Manager package repositories to your site and install SUSE Manager via your SMT server.

Where JeOS comes into play

Now what if you are a big fan of the SUSE Manager appliances that we shipped in the past? They were much smaller than a full SLES 12 SP2 installation media and didn’t require any additional software to be installed.

Well, that’s when JeOS comes into play. As Matthias Eckermann explained in an earlier post, it’s easy to add additional repositories like one of the modules we’ve introduced with SLES 12 using the SUSEregister command. And that’s exactly what we are going to do.

For virtualized deployments of SUSE Manager 3, the SLES 12 SP1 JeOS images are the easiest starting point. And the download is even smaller than the one for the SUSE Manager 2.1 appliance. For example, the KVM image is under 250 MB in size!

Unfortunately we don’t have JeOS images for SLES 12 SP2 yet, but those are going to be available soon. In the meantime the SP1 images are good enough for doing your first steps. And they can be updated to SP2 with a single command.

Eight simple steps to set up SUSE Manager 3 Server

• First make sure you are familiar with the SUSE Manager Getting Started Guide, especially the part about hardware requirements and setting a fully qualified hostname! It now has a dedicated section on setting up SUSE Manager with the JeOS image that also describes how to add extra disk volumes: https://www.suse.com/documentation/suse-manager-3/book_suma3_quickstart_3/data/sles_installation_within_kvm_jeos.html
• If you don’t have one yet, get a SUSE Manager registration code. Evaluation codes for up to 60 days are available from the SUSE Manager product page.
• Download one of the JeOS images. If you already are a SUSE customer, you can get it from here.
  Or you can download the media from the JeOS product page. You don’t need to worry about the registration code for SLES, because you are going to use the one for SUSE Manager Server.
• Start your JeOS as a VM and go through the easy configuration steps.
• Register your JeOS:

  sudo SUSEConnect -e  [E-MAIL] -r [SUSE_MANAGER_CODE]
  

  Replace [E-MAIL] with the e-mail address from your organization’s account at the SUSE Customer Center (SCC). Replace [SUSE_MANAGER_CODE] with your valid SUSE Manager registration code (not a SLES registration code).

• Add the SUSE Manager repositories:

  sudo SUSEConnect -p SUSE-Manager-Server/3.0/x86_64 -r [SUSE_MANAGER_CODE]

• Install the SUSE Manager 3 pattern:

  sudo zypper in -t pattern suma_server

  Note that you may be asked by one of the RPM updates to apply a schema upgrade. You can ignore that message because you haven’t run the database setup yet.

• Finally run

  sudo yast2 susemanager_setup

That’s it! Eight steps, and that’s counting the part about reading the manual. 😉

There’s no easier and faster way of giving SUSE Manager 3 Server a try.

Let me conclude with two simple tricks that you should know when using JeOS images, where you don’t have any YaST unless you install it first:

• To find out all modules or extensions that are available for your JeOS image, type

   sudo SUSEConnect --list-extensions
  

• If you don’t know which patterns can be installed, zypper can help you:

  sudo zypper pt

This post was updated on February 9 because SLES 12 SP2 is now the preferred base for SUSE Manager.

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from Provo, Utah, where the mountains are close and SUSE is hiring: