ZCM should support CentOS releases in the currently supported branches.
CentOS is #3 on the top list of Internet's web servers (after Debian and Ubuntu), so shops running web services and ZCM are facing the problem that none of the top 3 web distros has any form of support in their systems management solution.
Since RHEL is already supported and CentOS is a binary-compatible derivate, I would suggest picking the low-hanging fruit first and implementing CentOS support even before planning for Ubuntu and/or Debian support for managed servers.
As of current, CentOS server admins are facing three main problems:
1. the Zenworks agent won't even start installing on current CentOS releases. The Linux agent installer does not handle double-dot version numbers (e.g 7.2.1511) correctly and aborts without reporting an error. Also, the agent installer is unable to correctly resolve and install the pci-utils dependency package
2. when installed, the Agent is unable to register with the zone as CentOS is not on the list of supported systems for the ZCM zone (/zenworks-registration/ostargets.xml)
3. obviously, Novell / MicroFocus support staff would not accept any support requests involving managed CentOS instances
by: Denis J. | over a year ago | Supportability
Comments
As a workaround, you can just copy the /etc/os-release from RHEL (or Scientific Linux < 7.6) to CentOS.
Heck, even copying it from RHEL 7 to CENTOS 8 makes everything work (you just have to force novell-zenworks-ruby rpm to install with nodeps, ln -s librpmio.so.8 to librpmio.so.3 and librpm.so.8 to librpm.so.3 and bam! it works).
It shouldn't be all that hard for Microfocus to just "edit" their binaries to accept CENTOS as OS ID and treat it like RHEL, as everything already works just by faking the os-releases.
Pseudocode => if OS == CENTOS then OS = RHEL ; That easy!
If it's a matter of support (as in technical support), just state that you do not support CENTOS, and users should run it at their own risk. But please, let us run CENTOS!
Also, newsflash! Scientific Linux is no more.
From Fermilab:
"We will deploy CentOS 8 in our scientific computing environments rather than develop Scientific Linux 8"
So when you start supporting RHEL 8 you can just drop Scientific Linux 8 and support Centos 8 instead.
Using some of the values from the os-release file would help moving forward as well.
namely:
ID="centos"
ID_LIKE="rhel fedora"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="centos"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION="8"