SUSE Manager Server Air-gapped Deployment

1. What is air-gapped deployment?

Air-gapped deployment refers to the setup and operation of any networked system that is physically isolated from insecure networks, especially the internet. This type of deployment is commonly used in high-security environments such as military installations, financial systems, critical infrastructure, and anywhere sensitive data is handled and must be protected from external threats.

You can easily deploy container images using Podman, Docker, or Skopeo on a machine with internet access.

Pull the desired image then, save the image as a tar archive. For example:

Listing 1. Podman
podman pull registry.suse.com/suse/manager/5.0/x86_64/server:5.0.0
podman save --output server.tar registry.suse.com/suse/manager/5.0/x86_64/server:5.0.0
Listing 2. Docker
docker pull registry.suse.com/suse/manager/5.0/x86_64/server:5.0.0
docker save --output server.tar registry.suse.com/suse/manager/5.0/x86_64/server:5.0.0
Listing 3. Skopeo
skopeo copy docker://registry.suse.com/suse/manager/5.0/x86_64/server:5.0.0 docker-archive:server.tar:registry.suse.com/suse/manager/5.0/x86_64/server:5.0.0

Transfer the resulting server-image.tar to the Server container host and load it using the following command:

Listing 4. Load the Server Image
podman load -i server.tar