Installation

I installed SUSE Manager on a virtual machine running on VMware vSphere—the product came on an iso image bundled with a copy of SLES 11.

SUSE Manager ships with a built-in Oracle XE database, which I used for my tests. In a production environment, Novell recommends using a full-sized version of Oracle 10g or 11g.

After installing the server, I configured software update channels for SLES 11 and for RHEL 6.

The SUSE Manager Web console should be familiar to anyone who’s used Red Hat Network or Red Hat Satellite to manage systems.

My test SUSE Manager installation prompted me with system update alerts as relevant patches became available.

I tested with RHEL and SLES VMs. Both of my test machines retained their standard software installation tools—for RHEL, yum, and for SLES, zypper—but both tools fetched their packages from SUSE Manager.

I was able to issue commands from SUSE Manager to be executed on my test machines.

I created a configuration management group, added my SLES and RHEL systems to the group, and pushed down a small configuration file to the pair of systems.