Since the last release of this guide in December 2020 the Consulting Installation Framework has been enhanced to support SLES15 SP4 and OES2023.
However, as the principals on which our solution is based do still apply the decision has been made to not update the text of the guide and the figures as a whole. Instead this section briefly explains what has changed and refers the reader to sections that have been added to this guide.
The updated version of the CIF has been extensively tested with AutoYaST on SLES15 SP4 and ZENworks Configuration Management 2020.3. Earlier releases of SLES have not been tested but should work.
IMPORTANT:Due to changes in the way dependencies between packages can be defined you must have Official FTF 959 for ZENworks 2020 Update 3 applied to your ZCM Primary servers before creating any YUM repositories for SLES5 SP4 or OES2023. For more information, see Boolean Dependencies.
Using YUM repositories provided by ZCM as add-on repositories during the installation of SLES15 SP4 or OES 2023 will also only succeed if you have FTF 959 deployed before creating the YUM repositories.
WARNING:YUM repositories for SLES15 SP4 or OES2023 created without FTF 959 or on earlier releases of ZCM will not be operational and can break a system beyond repair!
As the ZENworks Adaptive Agent does not understand Boolean Dependencies, zac bin or zac up must not be used to apply updates to either SLES15 SP4 or OES2023. For this reason we no longer recommend to assign the ZCM Update Bundle Groups to device groups. See, Assigning a Frozen Patch Level.Use the zypper patch command instead to apply the updates available from the YUM repositories of the ZCM Update Bundle Groups. With btrfs using zypper patch has the additional advantage that you automatically create file system snapshots of your system before and after the patches are applied.
You can still use zac bin or zac up to update releases of SLES or OES that do not use Boolean Dependencies but we strongly recommend to switch to zypper patch and to remove the assignment between ZCM Update Bundle Groups to device groups for all releases.
Micro Focus Subscription Management Tool 2.0 that became available in November 2022 is supported on SLES15 SP4 or on OES2023 and can be used to provide updates to all OES versions.
For production systems using btrfs we now recommend a minimum size of 70 GB for the system disk while 30 GB are now recommended for test systems.
For new installations we recommend to configure your systems with UEFI firmware. This requires some changes to the disk partitioning to accommodate the EFI system partition. The partitioning XML snippets *UEFI*.xml have the required modifications.
SLES15 SP4 and therefore OES2023 use chronyd instead of ntpd to receive time. By default chronyd uses a set of public NTP servers. As many customers do not allow their servers to access any system on the internet the function remove_chrony_include that comments the include command at the end of /etc/chrony.conf has been added to post-inst.sh. to prevent the inclusion of public time sources on any SLES15 SP4 or OES203 system installed with the CIF.
The definitions for the different OES2023 Service Types have been added to Your_CUSTOMER.txt and the software selection files for these OES2023 Service Types are also provided.
OES2023 adds the Unified Management Console (UMC) intended to replace iManager for the management of OES services. The configuration information for this new component is contained in the XML class file umc.xml. Anticipating that customers will deploy UMC in the same may as the currently deploy iManager we have added the new service type OES2023_EDIR_UMC to Your_CUSTOMER.txt. The corresponding software selection is defined in soft-oes2023_edir-umc.xml.
Parameters to accommodate the UMC configuration information have been added to Your_CUSTOMER.txt, Your_Tree.txt and to Your_Location.txt.
Finally the new release contains numerous corrections and clarifications based on the feedback received from our customers. Remember, the comments in the configuration files are the only documentation that we maintain.
There are also a number of changes with respect to the ZCM configuration bundles we provide. The following bundles are new:
SLES-SERVICES > SLESALL_MFC-DHCP-BOND0
SLES-SERVICES > SLESALL_MFC-DISABLE-ZISLNX-SERVICE
The following bundles have been updated:
iMan-BASECONFIG > IMAN_NOV-change-config-xml
OESLES-SERVICES > OESALL_NOV-BASHRC
SLES-SERVICES > SLESALL_NOV-NTP-SYSCONFIGS-SERVICES
Finally, ZCM configuration bundle OES2018_MFC-DISABLE-CIS-AGENTS in folder OES-SERVICES needs to be replaced with bundle OES2018_MFC-DISABLE-OES-AGENTS.
Upon popular demand we have included the net-tools-deprecated package that provides legacy commands such as route. Therefor you need to replicate the OES2023-SLE-Module-Legacy15-SP4-Pool channel as dependency bundle and create a YUM repository for it.
In each chapter of Section III, How To Build Your Own Installation Framework we have added a section with detailed instructions on how to update an existing build environment to the latest CIF release.