Virtualization

You can use SUSE Manager to manage virtualized clients in addition to regular traditional or Salt clients. In this type of installation, a virtual host is installed on the SUSE Manager Server to manage any number of virtual guests. If you choose to, you can install several virtual hosts to manage groups of guests.

The range of capabilities that virtualized clients have depends on the third-party virtualization provider you choose.

Xen and KVM hosts and guests can be managed directly in SUSE Manager. This enables you to autoinstall hosts and guests using AutoYaST or Kickstart, and manage guests in the Web UI.

Additionally, SUSE CaaS Platform clusters can be managed in the SUSE Manager Web UI, by navigating to Clusters  Overview.

For VMWare, including VMWare vSphere, and Nutanix AHV, SUSE Manager requires you to set up a virtual host manager (VHM) to control the VMs. This gives you control over the hosts and guests, but in a more limited way than available with Xen and KVM.

Other third-party virtualization providers are not directly supported by SUSE Manager. However, if your provider allows you to export a JSON configuration file for the VM, you can upload that configuration file to SUSE Manager and manage it with a VHM.

For more information about using VHMs to manage virtualization, see client-configuration:vhm.adoc.

SUSE Support and VM Zones

Public cloud providers use regions to define the physical geographic location of the datacenter providing virtual machines. For example, US-East, or Asia.

Regions are then further divided into zones. For example, the US-East region might contain zones called us-east-2a and us-east-2b, among others.

SUSE uses the zone of a virtual machine to determine the appropriate subscription to provide. If all of your VMs are provided by the same zone, you are within the terms and conditions of the 1-2 Virtual Machines subscription.

If your VMs are provided by different zones, even if they are within the same region, you might not meet the conditions of the 1-2 Virtual Machines subscription. In this case, check your subscription carefully.

For BYOS instances (bring your own subscription), all installed products are passed to the subscription matcher. If your public cloud instances are PAYG (pay as you go), their base products will be excluded from the subscription matcher counting.

The calculation about whether an instance is PAYG or BYOS is done at the time of registration or when a hardware refresh action is executed.

For more information, see https://www.suse.com/products/terms_and_conditions.pdf or contact SUSE.