SUSE YES Certification bulletin exposed – part 1

What information is important for you to have documented on a SUSE YES Certification bulletin?

Can the information documented on a bulletin help you with your hardware purchasing decisions, reduce future stress and eliminate a number of future pesky headaches?

The correct answers are a “great deal of information that you may not have been aware of” and “oh, YES: it can”!

YES Certification Bulletin Deep Dive

Let’s start at the top of a bulletin and work down, deep diving on some content and grazing over others. If you don’t already know, the best location to search for YES Certified hardware is https://www.suse.com/yessearch/. You may want to go to that URL and open a certification bulletin from your favorite hardware vendor as you continue reading this blog entry.

System Product Name

The top of the bulletin contains the system name, which may also include model or configuration data. Just under the system name is one of two options: Network Server or Workstation. Network servers are tested as a server, and workstations are tested on a desktop, laptop, netbook, etc. (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server compared to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, respectively). Some hardware compatibility testing is the same between servers and workstations (memory, disk, network, I/O ports, etc.), but there are also some big differences. Servers are tested with a minimum of two network adapters, setting up multiple network segments; workstations require only one network adapter. (However, a workstation may have a wired and wireless adapter which are both certified.) Workstations require power management and graphical desktop compatibility or OS graphics functionality testing; servers do not.

Certified SUSE Operating System

The next section down on the bulletin is the “YES CERTIFIED” Operating System, or version and service pack of SUSE Linux Enterprise used in validating the hardware. This section also designates whether a server certification was tested in a SUSE virtualized environment, in other words, as a SUSE KVM or Xen host.

Third-party Hypervisor or Guest Certification

Finally, if the Operating Systems section is empty, then SUSE Linux Enterprise was tested as a perfect guest on third-party hypervisor or virtualization host platform. If the server hardware was tested with SUSE virtualization or on a third-party virtualization platform, then the next section on the bulletin after Operating System will contain the virtual machines or guest OS’s that were tested. This lists the OS version of the guests that were used during certification. This list will include a minimum of three guests: they could be three with the same version and architecture of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or different versions and/or architectures. For example a bulletin may contain three SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 guests or two SLES 12 guests and two SLES 11 SP3 guests. It can also include a Windows server guest if the hardware developer supports Windows guests on a SLES host. Finally, the guest OS section will also document whether the guest was fully- or para-virtualized when the host OS is SLES Xen.

Because of this information, SUSE YES Certification is vital when making hardware decisions. You can find more information about SUSE YES Certification at https://www.suse.com/partners/ihv/yes/ or search for certified hardware at https://www.suse.com/yessearch/. How you can use hardware certification to help you reduce overall support of your hardware which can help to stretch your budgets a little further. Stay tuned for my next blog entries (SUSE YES Certification bulletin exposed – part 2, – part 3 and – part 4), in which I will continue explaining the content on a YES Certification bulletin. For other YES Certification topics, check out my other blogs.