YES Search: The way to all information…well, about certified hardware anyway

Where can you find the certification bulletins for more than 47,200 servers, workstations and other hardware components? How can you determine whether your company’s specific hardware is YES Certified with the latest SUSE Linux Enterprise release? Where can you find the specific hardware configuration for the certified server you are planning to buy and deploy with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3? As you compare hardware vendors, is there a good place to view each vendor’s hardware compatibility with SUSE Linux Enterprise? The answer to all of these questions is the YES CERTIFIED Bulletin YES Search page found at: https://www.suse.com/yessearch/.

In all of my previous blog posts, except one, I refer readers to the best place to search for YES CERTIFICATION Bulletins; which is https://www.suse.com/yessearch/. In this post I will detail some of the specifics on how to use the YES Search page to find the information you need about certified hardware.

YES Certification Bulletin Number

Every YES CERTIFICATION Bulletin is issued a bulletin number when it is released. This number is unique to that bulletin and is a very fast way to find a specific hardware certification. At the top of the YES Search page you can enter the bulletin number and quickly find that specific certification bulletin. Your hardware sales professional should be able to provide this bulletin number to you. If they don’t, keep reading: the information below will give you the power to find this information on your own.

YES Search – Keyword Search

If you don’t know the bulletin number, which is normally the case, you can perform your own search using a specific system name keywords. You enter these as search words in the Keywords field on the YES CERTIFIED Bulletin Search page. Keep in mind that the keywords field only searches the following sections on the certification bulletin: 1) system name, 2) the company name at the top of the bulletin and 3) the product description. No other bulletin data is searched when using the keywords search field. For example you cannot search for a specific CPU that is listed only in the Tested Configuration section of the bulletin.

The more accurate and precise the keywords you enter, like an exact marketing name for the system, the faster you will be able to narrow down your specific hardware search. You can also help narrow down the search with the drop-down to the right of the keywords field. This allows you to search based on additional criteria, which include the following options: “all of these words”, “at least one of these words” or “this exact phrase.”

YES Search – Hardware/Software Type

The Hardware / Software Type drop down on the search page should always be left as “Hardware / Software.” The other options in this drop down are historical; they were used when Novell certified a larger number of other things in addition to systems, such as applications, host bus adapters and printers. For SUSE system certification searches the default Hardware / Software entry in this drop down is best.

YES Search – Company or Product Search

The next two selectable options on the search page are Company and Product. These refer to the SUSE hardware partner company and the SUSE product, respectively. These can be used individually or in conjunction with the keywords field. It is not a requirement to select either the company or product; the keywords search will work with or without them, and they will work without a keywords entry as well. The company and product options offer an additional way to quickly narrow down your search for certified hardware.

YES Search – Date Search

The final field of note on the YES CERTIFIED Search page is the search date near the bottom of the page. This can be used to search forward from a given date. For example, if you want only results from January 1, 2016, forward, then an entry of “01-01-2016” will eliminate any bulletins released before that date. This can be helpful if you are looking for only the newest SUSE Linux operating system and are not concerned with certifications of older operating systems.

Something to keep in mind with all search results is that they are displayed with the latest released or newest bulletin at the top with subsequent or older bulletins that match the entered search criteria, listed in order down the search results page.

A search results page for a system certification will contain the following data: bulletin number, company, product name, category or type of certification, the SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system certified and the date of certification. The only exception to this is a third-party hypervisor “system” certification that will not contain an operating system; these certifications validate SUSE Linux Enterprise as the perfect guest.

I hope this helps you as you search for and buy SUSE-compatible hardware and virtualization platforms that are YES Certified. You can find more information about SUSE YES Certification at https://www.suse.com/partners/ihv/yes/. Stay tuned for future blog topics about SUSE YES Certification. You can also review previous YES Certification blogs at YES Certification blog posts.