SUSE Studio generated appliances (images) – and support

SUSE Studio  is a great tool to generate appliances (images) that you can then deploy in physical, virtual and cloud environments. As product manager for SUSE Studio, I’ve been asked several times over the last months on the exact conditions of how SUSE supports the resulting images.

I can now answer this questions with a simple link: http://susestudio.com/help/use/supportability.html.

Basically, if you run a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (or Desktop) image and have a valid subscription for it, we would support you under the same conditions as if you have installed the product directly from the installation media.
For support purposes, additional packages might need to be installed to help with diagnosing and reporting. Also, if you replace software packages that are part of SUSE Linux Enterprise by others, than the replaced software and packages dependent on it cannot be supported.

To help to figure out whether SUSE can support an appliance, SUSE Studio creates a “Supportability Report” for each SUSE Linux Enterprise appliance. This report executes an automatic analysis of the generated appliance and uses heuristics to determine out what SUSE will support. The Supportability Report should be viewed as a tool to highlight potential deviations.

Full details are at this link  which is also reachable via the “Supportability Report”.