Overview

SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager is a software stack enabling centralized, full cloud-native OS management with Kubernetes.

The SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager Stack consists of a handful of packages on top of SLE Micro:

  • elemental-toolkit - Includes a set of OS utilities to enable OS management via containers. Includes dracut modules, bootloader configuration, cloud-init style configuration services, etc.

  • elemental-operator - Connects to Rancher Manager and handles MachineRegistration and MachineInventory CRDs.

  • elemental-register - Registers machines via machineRegistrations and installs them via elemental-cli.

  • elemental-cli - Installs any elemental-toolkit based derivative. Basically an installer based on our A/B install and upgrade system.

  • rancher-system-agent - Runs on the installed system and gets instructions ("Plans") from Rancher Manager what to install and run on the system.

Cluster Node OSes are built and maintained via container images through the SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager CLI and they can be installed on new hosts using the SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager UI plugin for Rancher Manager or the SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager CLI.

The SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager Operator and the Rancher System Agent enable Rancher Manager to fully control SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager clusters, from the installation and management of the OS on the Nodes to the provisioning of new K3s or RKE2 clusters in a centralized way.

SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager on x86-64 hardware

SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager is production ready and fully supported on x86-64 starting with Rancher v2.7.0.

SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager on ARM hardware

ARM (aarch64) is functional in the development stage. ARM is currently only tested on Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with k3s 1.24.8 (or later). Feedback is welcome.

SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager on other hardware

SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager is currently targeting 'edge' scenarios and does therefore not support other hardware. We will re-assess this as the market evolves.

Ready to give it a try?

Get an SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager Cluster up and running with your preferred method

What’s next?

Want more details? Take a look at the Architecture section or reach out to the {elemental_slack_name} Slack channel.