Last winter we had the intention of using VMWare branded Novell Suse Enterprise as we were going to be getting the licenses/subscription through the purchase of Vsphere. Since that time we have set up 4 VMs, and have been testing an application that will soon be going into production status. However a new issue has arisen. As we are over budget we will not get the Vsphere license (which included Suse subscription). We also found that the added features of a Vsphere license do not really add anything over the free ESX hypervisor.
On the one hand these servers have all been configured precisely, on the other hand we have no update service from which I understand we would need a Novell subscription. Most of the repositories we have added are external to Novell, meaning they are community ones. So my questions are this:
1.) Can we use Opensuse community repositories for the Online Update?
2.) If not is there a way to easily ‘convert’ Enterprise Suse to Opensuse?
Obviously what we first want to avoid is having to do a brand new install of Opensuse and spend the time moving data from the old to the new. One of the issues that has caused the delay and over runs is that the application we will be deploying has not lived up to its promises, and has caused considerable amount of time configuring, tweaking, and de-bugging. And yes I fully expect and answer being that we just need to install OpenSuse, but you never know.
> 1.) Can we use Opensuse community repositories for the Online Update?
What you might find is that some of the repositories have a companion
repository for SLE. If you go to http://software.opensuse.org/search and
search for a package, you’ll see that there is an option to select SLE
releases as well as openSUSE releases.
OBS lets people build the packages for different platforms, so a
maintainer could make a package available by adding that option to the
build options in OBS.
You should be aware, though, that using community repos might have
repercussions in your SLE support agreement. You’ll want to talk to the
SUSE folks to get clarification on that (you could start by asking this
in the Novell forums’ SLE forums, but probably you’ll want to talk to
your account rep or to the support folks directly).
> 2.) If not is there a way to easily ‘convert’ Enterprise Suse to
> Opensuse?
Not that I know of - back up the data and you could try one of the
upgrade options, or just install openSUSE over SLE (but again, have a
backup - SLE should have installed with a separate /home partition, so
it may be just as simple as overwriting the / partition with the openSUSE
install.
No
openSUSE now works on an eight month cycle; there have been four new openSUSE distros since the current Enterprise version was released. You can update the Enterprise version by taking out a subscription but the base systems will now be so different that only a fresh install of openSUSE is viable if you do not wish to continue with the Enterprise version.
There is now an Evergreen version of openSUSE which may suit you in future but that was only started recently; so its base system is unlikely to be similar enough to the Enterprise versions to make a viable option. The alternatives appear to be to pay up for the cheapest subscription or to grit your teeth and start again. Which one is more costly for you in the long term only you can work out.