SUSE Manager in the Public Cloud

For those that check the general catalog in Amazon EC2 every now and then or the VMDepot in Microsoft Azure you may have already discovered that SUSE Manager Server version 2.1 images have been released. For everyone else tadah, SUSE Manager Server 2.1 is now available as a Bring Your Own Subscription (BYOS) image in Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure.

In Amazon EC2 the images are available through the general catalog, searching for “suse” or “manager” will find the image in each of the Amazon EC2 regions. In Google compute engine you need to subscribe to the suse-byos-cloud@googlegroups.com group to get access to the image (this is the same group you use to get access to the SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 BYOS images.) In Microsoft Azure the image can be launched from the VMDepot.

Update 2017-05-26: The google group “suse-byos-cloud at googlegroups dot com” has been deleted and BYOS image in GCE are public and can be instantiated just like other public images. In Azure images are found in the Marketplace, VMDepot is no longer maintained.

SUSE Manager is of course already able to manage updates for your BYOS (Bring Your Own Subscription) instances in the Public Cloud. But now you can run SUSE Manager in the Public Cloud to manage your instances in the Public Cloud and/or in your data center.

There are a few things to consider when running SUSE Manager Server in the Public Cloud and the SUSE Manager Server in the Public Cloud documentation provides the necessary details.

For example you want to make certain to choose a sufficiently large instance size and increase the root volume size. For repository storage use an attached virtual disk. A helper script is included in the image to make it easy to modify the running instance to use the attached storage.

Once the instance is up and running and the few cloud specific preliminaries are taken care of, follow the documented setup procedure. After the setup is complete access the SUSE Manager Server instance through the web interface just as you would for a running SUSE Manager Server in your data center.

The SUSE Manager Server image is a BYOS instance which implies that you need a SUSE Manager Server entitlement and you need to register the running instance with the SUSE Customer Center. This is no different than running SUSE Manager Server on premise.

Along with your entitlement comes your SUSE Support subscription. The image is fully supported by SUSE and you can get help using the support channels you are already accustomed to.