SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager the visual way

In order to enable the Rancher Manager Extensions Support, you’ll need to follow the steps below:

After the Rancher Manager Extensions Support is enabled, you can install the elemental plugin as follow:

Once the elemental plugin installed, you can see the OS Management option in the Rancher Manager menu, refresh the page if you do not see it.

Click on the OS Management button in the navigation menu.

If the operator is not already installed, the elemental ui will let you deploy it by clicking on the Install SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager Operator button:

It will redirect you to the Rancher Marketplace to install the operator.

Click on the Next button:

In this screen, you can customize or use the default values, click on Install to continue:

You should see elemental-operator-crdsand elemental-operator deployed in the cattle-elemental-system namespace:

In the OS Management dashboard, click the Create Registration Endpoint button.

Now here either you can enter each detail in its respective places or you can edit this as YAML and create the endpoint in one go. Here we’ll edit every fields.

Once you create the machine registration end point it should show up as active.

Now this is the last step, you need to prepare a seed image that includes the initial registration config, so it can be auto registered, installed and fully deployed as part of your cluster. The contents of the file are nothing more than the registration URL that the node needs to register and the proper server certificate, so it can connect securely.

This seed image can then be used to provision an infinite number of machines.

The seed image is created as a Kubernetes resource above and can be built using the Build Media button, but first, you have to select ISO or RAW image.

In opposite to ISO where it needs two devices (device with ISO and another disk where to install SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager), RAW image allows to boot from a single device and directly install the operating system in the device. RAW image only contains a boot and a recovery partition and it boots first into recovery mode to install SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager (for information, the process is similar to the reset one).

Once the build is done, media can be downloaded using the Download Media button:

You can now boot your nodes with this image and they will:

When nodes are booting up for the first time, they connect to Rancher Manager and a Machine Inventory is created for each node.

Custom columns are based on Machine Inventory Labels which you can add when you create your Machine Registration Endpoint:

On the following screenshot, Hardware Labels are used as custom columns:

You can also add custom columns by clicking on the three dots menu.

Finally, you can also filter your Machine Inventory using those labels.

For instance if you only want to see your AMD machines, you can filter on CPUModel like below:

Now let’s use those Machine Inventory to create a cluster by clicking on Create SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager Cluster :

For your SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager cluster, you can either choose K3s or RKE2 for Kubernetes.

Most of the options are coming from Rancher, that’s why we will not detail all the possibilities. Feel free to check the Rancher Manager documentation if you want to know more.

However, it is important to highlight the Inventory of Machines Selector Template section.

It lets you choose which Machine Inventory you want to use to create your SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager cluster using the previously defined Machine Inventory Labels :

As our three Machine Inventories contain the label CPUVendor with the key AuthenticAMD, the three machines will be used to create the SUSE® Rancher Prime OS Manager cluster.