SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Covers a Lot of Ground

by Jason Brooks

SLES 11 offers install-time options for deploying virtualization guest or host systems, as well as for setting up regular bare-metal servers.

SLES 11 includes code from the Red Hat-driven virt-manager project for keeping tabs on virtual machines. The tool is appreciably more basic than the comparable virtualization tools from VMware or Citrix.

SLES 11 makes it fairly easy to configure an installation source that’s discoverable on one’s local network through SLP.

SLES 11’s VM creation tool, however, didn’t detect the service.

I was able to delegate specific system rights, such as those for monitoring VMs on a SLES host, with PolicyKit.

When running SLES 11 in graphical mode as a limited rights user, PolicyKit prompted me for an administrative password before carrying out certain operations.

I ran into a snag while installing an rPath Mediawiki appliance under SLES 11’s Xen hypervisor.

Novell has integrated into the system’s software management toolset information about the support level that customers can expect for the various components that ship with SLES 11.

The packages for experimentally offered SELinux and KVM functionality are marked as “unsupported,” while a package I installed from SLES sister distribution OpenSUSE was marked with a support level of “unknown.”

I had to modify a configuration file to allow my SLES 11 test machines to use unsupported kernel modules.