Any installation requires one or multiple repositories that contain the patterns and packages for the operating system and Add-On products to be installed.
Up to and including OES2015 the Add-On product OES could be installed together with the underlying SLES operating system or in a separate step, after SLES had been installed.
With OES2018 OES has become a product in its own right and can only be installed from the OES Install Media, which is a single integrated install media that includes both SLES and OES. Installation of OES on top of an existing SLES server is no longer supported.
Optionally updates for the operating system and any Add-On product can be deployed as part of the installation process. The updates can be provided by different types of repositories:
Local repositories on CD-ROMs, DVDs, HDs or USB devices, etc.
Remote repositories accessible over network protocols such as HTTP, FTP, NFS, or SMB. These repositories can be advertised via SLP.
Supported repository types are yast2 and rpm-md. yast2 repositories are corresponding to SUSE's installation media format and are the only repository type that can be used for operating system installations.
rpm-md (Repository Metadata) is the original repository type of YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and only supported for the installation of Add-On products or updates.
Local installation repositories have advantages over remote repositories in rare cases where network bandwidth and/or network latency are limiting factors.
One example would be the installation of a branch office server behind a slow WAN link. We have made very good experiences with the use of internal USB sticks, memory cards, or ISO images stored on a virtualization host in the location to provide all repositories required to install servers in remote locations, including the repositories providing the updates.
We strongly recommend that you use remote installation repositories for your AutoYaST framework wherever possible, because they provide the following advantages:
A central repository for all servers prevents the necessity to distribute large physical installation media to all systems being installed.
Only one small boot medium or PXE is required to start the installation process. Everything else is retrieved over the network.
In most environments network based installations achieve higher throughput than installations using physical media.
Multiple products can be installed together without the need to change the installation media (i. e. SLES11 SP4 and OES2015 SP1).
Installation sources can be made available permanently allowing for easy installation of additional software packages at a later stage.
A remote installation repository must be specified at the boot prompt as follows:
install=<protocol>://<IP Address|DNS-Name>/<path to media content>
For example:
install=http://10.10.10.101/oes2018sp2