documentation.suse.com / SUSE Edge Documentation / Components Used / Edge Image Builder

9 Edge Image Builder

 

See the Official Repository.

Edge Image Builder (EIB) is a tool that streamlines the generation of Customized, Ready-to-Boot (CRB) disk images for bootstrapping machines. These images enable the end-to-end deployment of the entire SUSE software stack with a single image.

Whilst EIB can create CRB images for all provisioning scenarios, EIB demonstrates a tremendous value in air-gapped deployments with limited or completely isolated networks.

9.1 How does SUSE Edge use Edge Image Builder?

 

SUSE Edge uses EIB for the simplified and quick configuration of customized SLE Micro images for a variety of scenarios. These scenarios include the bootstrapping of virtual and bare-metal machines with:

  • Fully air-gapped deployments of K3s/RKE2 Kubernetes (single & multi-node)

  • Fully air-gapped Helm chart and Kubernetes manifest deployments

  • Registration to Rancher via Elemental API

  • Metal3

  • Customized networking (for example, static IP, host name, VLAN’s, bonding, etc.)

  • Customized operating system configurations (for example, users, groups, passwords, SSH keys, proxies, NTP, custom SSL certificates, etc.)

  • Air-gapped installation of host-level and side-loaded RPM packages (including dependency resolution)

  • Registration to SUSE Manager for OS management

  • Embedded container images

  • Kernel command-line arguments

  • Systemd units to be enabled/disabled at boot time

  • Custom scripts and files for any manual tasks

9.2 Getting started

 

Comprehensive documentation for the usage and testing of Edge Image Builder can be found here.

Additionally, here is a quick start guide (Chapter 3, Standalone clusters with Edge Image Builder) for Edge Image Builder covering a basic deployment scenario.

9.3 Known issues

 

  • EIB air-gaps Helm charts through templating the Helm charts and parsing all the images within the template. If a Helm chart does not keep all of its images within the template and instead side-loads the images, EIB will not be able to air-gap those images automatically. The solution to this is to manually add any undetected images to the embeddedArtifactRegistry section of the definition file.