What do French Fries and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server have in common?

Did the headline catch your attention? 🙂

The answer is: Both are now coming pre-salted! And with the newest SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 1 “Second Edition” Just enough Operating System images (that’s quite a mouthful) you don’t even have to worry about your health: There are no known side effects!

Salt is the most flexible and fastest configuration management and remote management tool we could find, and if you’ve been following my previous blog posts you already know that that’s the reason why we’ve chosen it for SUSE Manager.

With the “pre-salted” new images for our minimal SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 builds that we like to call “JeOS” (pronounced like “juice”) we’ve not only proven that sweet and salty can be a good combination:

We’ve finally solved the chicken and egg problem!

In the past, customers who wanted to start new instances of SUSE Linux Enterprise and then let them be managed and updated by SUSE Manager would have to use a sometimes pretty complicated process that ensures that the agent software that SUSE Manager needs to take over command is installed first.

So you want to manage all your systems through a centralized tool that helps you with tedious tasks like rolling out an agent to all your boxes, but to actually get there you’d need to roll out an agent first!

Well, not any more. Once you’ve fired up one of the new JeOS images, which come in tasty KVM, Xen, OpenStack, Hyper-V, and VMware flavors, all you have to do is edit a single configuration option to point the image to your SUSE Manager server and then start the Salt agent (or Minion as Salt calls it).

For the really lazy, you can also just tell your DNS server to make your SUSE Manager server known to your network as salt.yourdomain, so you can even skip the configuration step.

Give it a try! Downloads are available now. I’m doing all my SUSE Manager demo setups and trainings with the new JeOS images these days, and they’ve saved me a lot of time and effort.

By the way, if you need yet another flavor of JeOS with Salt, we also ship the KIWI files needed to build your own.

Next time I’m going to tell you about something even cooler: If JeOS is no option for you, the upcoming onboarding feature in SUSE Manager 3 will do the job. Again we are using Salt. Because Salt can install itself! If you don’t believe me, stay tuned for the next blog post!

This is Joachim Werner blogging live from the Nuremberg office, where we spice up your Linux experience.