III How To Build Your Own Installation Framework

This solution has been developed and tested by Micro Focus Consulting Germany in cooperation with SUSE Consulting Germany. The scripts, the configuration files, the PXE configuration files, the ZCM bundles and some other supporting material that is intended to simplify the process of building your own installation framework are available at the CIF download site. This material is provided as is and is not officially supported by Micro Focus. Micro Focus Terms of Use do apply.

This section provides instructions how to use the contents of the archive cif.tgz to build your own AutoYaST, to build and configure your ZENworks Management Zone supporting SLES12 SP5, SLES15 SP1 and OES2018 SP2, and to optionally create your PXE environment.

The archive contains the following files:

  • AutoYaST-cif_yyyymmdd.tgz

    Everything needed to build your own AutoYaST server

  • ZCM-cif_yyyymmdd.tgz

    Everything needed to build and configure your ZENworks Management Zone

    • zman_params.cfg

      This is the parameter file that defines the names for the folders for devices, bundles, and registration keys and is used by all bash scripts used to build your ZCM zone. If you plan to use more or other releases and/or support packs you will need to set the parameters appropriately in zman_params.cfg to include them into your setup.

    • /zman_structure_create

      The bash script zman_structure_create.sh consumes zman_params.cfg and creates the file zman_structure_create.in which contains all zman commands required to build the desired structure in your ZCM zone.

      If you want to use the names for folders, groups and registration keys that we have used throughout this guide you just can process the file zman_structure_create.in.cif provided in this directory.

    • /zman_bundle_assign

      The bash script zman_bundle_assign.sh consumes zman_params.cfg and creates the file zman_bundle_assign.in which contains all zman commands required to assign the configuration bundles to the various bundle groups..

      If you want to use the names for folders, groups and registration keys that we have used throughout this guide you just can process the file zman_bundle_assign.in.cif provided in this directory.

    • /ZCM_bundles

      This folder contains archives with exported ZCM configuration bundles discussed in Managing Configuration Bundles and Configuration Bundle Groups, one archive for each bundle folder.

  • PXE_AutoYaST-cif_yyyymmdd.tgz

    Everything needed to use your AutoYaST server as TFTP server.

  • PXE_ZCM-cif_yyyymmdd.tgz

    Everything needed to use a ZCM Primary server as TFTP server.

    In this archive /srv/tftp/pxemenu.txt and /srv/tftp/efi/x86_64/pxemenu.txt are renamed to CIF-pxemenu.txt to protect any existing PXE configuration.

It will take some time to build your own installation framework. In particular it will take some time to figure which information should be provided in which configuration file.

Most customers find that the best thing to do is to start with a small test environment that uses all OES components to understand the effect of the various settings before starting to customize the solution to meet your needs.