After getting some requests for a howto on installing ZenWorks on top of SLES, here's a quick writeup.

NOTE: To avoid issues with certain services install ZenWorks 7 on a SLES 10 32 bit version. For those successfully running Zen7 on 64bit, I'd appreciate your feedback
--UPDATE (07-06-2009) : Zen7 SP1 IR4 fixes this issue, see http://www.diwi.nl/node/45 for more info--

Read more on installing a SLES 10 base including eDirectoy 8.8.3

An old post, but still useful when cloning / imaging, so I tough I'd just post it here also.

Note: This should work with (open)SUSE 10 and later (as also other distro versions with slight modification).

A couple of months ago I came across a situation where I wanted to P2V a relay server from a small desktop to a VMWare ESX server. Making and restoring the image was no problem but after restoring and editing the relevant files, I thought I was on a roll until at boot up I got the message :
' waiting for /dev/sda3 to appear ...'.
Until now I had apparently been lucky enough to have a similar chipset when imaging from one system to another.

For those that might hit the same issue, here's my two cents for ya..
This can also be of use when swapping out vital components in your existing system.

When using XEN virtualization it's good practice to use LVM volumes as raw disk devices for the vm guests. The main advantage is that there is no file system for the Xen host to manage and the guest has direct access to the physical volume = better performance!
Another advantage is that you can leverage LVM snapshots adding a similar function to your Xen setup as known in VMWare.

One drawback when using LVM for your virtual guests is that the vm's disk is less portable. There are tools that can handle LVM imaging, but dd is the OSS tool giving you a 1:1 copy of your disk. It's free & it's proven.
dd's known drawback is that the dd dump files get big and time to backup/restore a LVM volume can be lengthy.

Here's how to speed things up and also save on space needed for your LVM images & backups by combining dd with gzip. On modern hardware you can get speeds up to ~90Mb/sec - meaning you can restore a template or image of 15 GB in 3 to 4 minutes.

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Here's how to get your first setup running on a SLES 10 SP2 server.

* SLES 10 can also be installed and used free of charge. You will get free updates for 60 days after which you will need a support contract to be able to update using the Novell channel.
Do note that the product does not expire nor lose any functionality. You will only lose the right for support & updates until you acquire a support contract from Novell.