Product Overview

SUSE Studio provides a suite of advanced, breakthrough technologies - everything a partner or an enterprise needs to build, remotely configure and update software images or appliances.

SUSE Studio is now available in one edition: SUSE Studio includes SUSE Studio Onsite (the base component of SUSE Studio), SUSE Lifecycle Management Server, WebYaST and KIWI Support. The former two editions SUSE Studio Advanced Edition and SUSE Studio Standard Edition have been merged.

SUSE Studio Onsite (a base component of SUSE Studio) is a local, behind the firewall version of SUSE Studio Online, which allows you to build application images or appliances for physical, virtual and cloud. SUSE Studio Onsite will provide the same configuration, easy to use interface and integrated testing features that made the online version of SUSE Studio (www.susestudio.ocm) popular, but will provide it on a server hosted within the data center. This configuration provides a level of security that enables software partners and enterprises to comfortably control the complete software appliance build process.

SUSE Studio Extension for System z is an Add-On for s390 hosts to build and test System z appliances.

SUSE Lifecycle Management Server is an innovative product that handles the authentication, entitlement and access control required for appliance vendors to distribute updates to their customers. The SUSE Lifecycle Management Server is primarily responsible for creating and then managing access to update repositories by appliances.

WebYaST is a tool for enabling remote, web-based configuration of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It is based on YaST, an integrated part of SUSE Linux Enterprise. WebYaST extends the capabilities of YaST to provide web-based configurations. WebYaST provides a framework for remote appliance configurations. Users will be able to create custom configuration modules and embed them in their appliances to meet unique remote appliance management needs.

KIWI Support is an award-winning support offering from SUSE extended to cover the open source project KIWI. KIWI, the image creation tool behind SUSE Studio and SUSE Linux Enterprise, is an excellent command-line tool for creating software images or appliances. SUSE support offers patches and updates, as well as technical support assistance to partners and customers using KIWI as part of SUSE Studio.

Hardware Architectures

SUSE Studio and its components can be deployed on x86-64 hardware only.

The System z runner allows building appliances that run on System z and needs the x86-64 hardware plus System z hardware.

Product News

SUSE Studio 1.3 new features include:

• SUSE Cloud Integration: SUSE Studio seamlessly integrates with SUSE Cloud. It can build images for SUSE Cloud and optionally also deploy directly to a SUSE Cloud instance.
• Enhanced SUSE Manager Integration: SUSE Manager can deploy images built in SUSE Studio. Images built in SUSE Studio directly appear in SUSE Manager and are available for deployment. Optionally, SUSE Studio can take packages from SUSE Manager for the inclusion in the built images and images can be instrumented to automatically register with SUSE Manager at deployment time.
• Enhanced Cloud Support for Amazon EC2: SUSE Studio can directly deploy to Amazon EC2 from SUSE Gallery. SUSE Studio UI for Amazon EC2 has seen multiple enhancements, including the EC2 management page cleanup.
• Delta RPM Support in SUSE Lifecycle Management Server. SUSE Lifecycle Management Server support delta RPMs, allowing to update the installed appliances faster and using less bandwidth. It will significantly decrease the download size of the updates.
• WebYaST has been tuned to be faster and require less memory. Also, multiple network cards are now supported.