SUSE Manager 5 on POWER/ppc64le

SUSE Manager
1

Hi!

The documentation of the installation of SUSE Manager 5 mentions ppc64le as supported/recommended architecture.
(This is mentioned here: https://documentation.suse.com/suma/5.0/en/suse-manager/installation-and-upgrade/container-deployment/suma/server-deployment-suma.html)

However, it also mentions this: “The supported operating system for the container host is SLE Micro 5.5.”
…and this OS does not support POWER/ppc64le: https://documentation.suse.com/sle-micro/5.5/html/SLE-Micro-all/book-deployment-slemicro.html

So, how exactly is SUSE Manager 5 supported on the ppc64le architecture, when the required OS is not?

With appreciation,
A confused customer

1 Like
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Whilst SUMA5 does support IBM POWER (ppc64le) you’ll need to use one of the VM images available from https://www.suse.com/download/suse-manager/ - select Stable Release 5.0 and Power for Architecture.

Please see https://documentation.suse.com/suma/5.0/en/suse-manager/installation-and-upgrade/container-deployment/suma/server-deployment-vm-suma.html

You’re also correct that SLE Micro 5.5 is not supported on IBM POWER (ppc64le) so I’ll report that to the documentation team.

3

Thanks for the reply smeflood!

I still have a bunch of questions though, as I have a hard time finding any documentation for SUMA5 for POWER :slight_smile:

The OS in the VM image for ppc64le is also SLE Micro 5.5.
So if the OS is not supported generally, how is it supported in an image? What is the difference?
Is it even possible to get OS updates when running the image for ppc64le, since the OS itself is not supported?

Also, there are supposedly 2 image types. A “raw” and a “self-installer”, but they are both .raw files that has to be dd’ed to a device - it doesn’t seem that there’s any difference. Why is one of them labelled as “self-installer”, when it’s just another raw image?

Also, there’s some problems with the images:

  • They don’t support multipathing. Multipathing with these images doesn’t work, as they use single path device names and warns about multiple devices names with same ID.
  • Because of the above the image boots to emergency mode, and since the root account is also locked (“…Cannot open access to console, the root account is locked”) even more steps have to be taken to get around that.