SLES12 as a container howto

[W.Rusman]

Since i looked everywhere for this and couldn't find it anywhere i had to figure it out by some very old documentation and bits and pieces from everywhere. I thought i should share it here to contribute to using SLES 12 as a CT instead of the full blown VM.

These steps should be done on a running SLES12 machine that is registered with yast or
SUSEConnect -r <key> -e <e-mail>

• mkdir /SLES12SP3
• mkdir /SLES12SP3/etc
• cp -r /etc/zypp/ /SLES12SP3/etc/zypp
• zypper --root /SLES12SP3 ref
• zypper --root /SLES12SP3 in -t pattern 'base'
• zypper --root /SLES12SP3 in -t pattern 'Minimal'
• zypper --root /SLES12SP3 in -t pattern 'yast2'
• rm -f /SLES12SP3/etc/mtab
• ln -s /proc/mounts /SLES12SP3/etc/mtab
• cd /SLES12SP3
• tar --numeric-owner -czf ../SLES12SP3.tar.gz .

Now copy the tar.gz to your workstation and it can be used as a template for your new SLES CT's.

 

[W.Rusman]

A little update with final tweaks for SLES12SP1 which uses a different set of patterns

mkdir /SLES12SP1
mkdir /SLES12SP1/etc
cp -a /etc/zypp/ /SLES12SP1/etc/zypp
ln -s /SLES12SP1/etc/product.d/SLES.prod /SLES12SP1/etc/product.d/baseproduct
zypper --root /SLES12SP1 ref
zypper --root /SLES12SP1 lp
zypper --root /SLES12SP1 in -t pattern 'base'
zypper --root /SLES12SP1 in -t pattern '32bit'
zypper --root /SLES12SP1 up
systemctl --root=/SLES12SP1 enable sshd
rm -f /SLES12SP1/etc/mtab
ln -s /proc/mounts /SLES12SP1/etc/mtab

cd /SLES12SP1
tar --numeric-owner -czf ../SLES12SP1.tar.gz .

 

[Alwin]

AFAIK, this will be a unsupported by SUSE, better go with an opensuse container.

 

[W.Rusman]

I agree, the only platforms that are supported are the complete hypervisors vmware and XEN and the Libvirt system of SLES 12 (but that's a pain by itself). Unfortunately the NetIQ software we use will only run on SLES so we are stuck to SLES in stead of OpenSUSE.

We've run the software in LXC containers for years for a large (75000 users) environment and would like to switch to proxmox for easier maintenance and overview.

And for future reference If proxmox is willing to support SLES, we should be fine as stated in the documentation :

IMPORTANT:NetIQ supports Identity Manager on enterprise-class virtualization systems that provide official support for the operating systems where NetIQ products are running. As long as the vendors of the virtualization systems officially support these operating systems, NetIQ supports the entire Identity Manager stack on them.