Enabling the RabbitMQ Management Plugin

Prior to 2.7.x version of RabbitMQ it was necessary to manually install the plug-ins that provided the management interface [as well as their dependencies]. Now in the 2.7.x series the management interface plug-in and related dependencies are included - but not enabled by default.  The management plug-in must be toggled into the enabled state using the new rabbitmq-plugins command.  Enabling a plug-in will automatically enable any other plug-ins that the specified plug-in depends on Whenever you enable or disable a plug-in you must restart the sever.
If you have a brand new 2.7.x instance installed, turn on the plug-in with:

service rabbitmq-server stop
rabbitmq-plugins enable rabbitmq_management
service rabbitmq-server restart

When you performed the rabbitmq-plugins command you should have seen the following output:

The following plugins have been enabled:
  mochiweb
  webmachine
  rabbitmq_mochiweb
  amqp_client
  rabbitmq_management_agent
  rabbitmq_management

You management interface at TCP/55672 should be available.  The initial login and password are "guest" and "guest".  You want to change those.

Idjit's Guide To Installing RabbitMQ on openSUSE 12.1

The RabbitMQ team provides a generic SUSE RPM which works on openSUSE 11.x, openSUSE 12.1, and I presume on the pay-to-play versions of SuSE Enterprise Server. About the only real dependency for RabbitMQ is the erlang platform which is packages in the erlang language repo. So the only real trick is getting the RabbitMQ package itself [from this page].  Then install and start is as simple as:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/erlang/openSUSE_12.1 erlang
zypper in erlang
wget http://www.rabbitmq.com/releases/rabbitmq-server/v2.8.1/rabbitmq-server-2.8.1-1.suse.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh rabbitmq-server-2.8.1-1.suse.noarch.rpm
service rabbitmq-server start

Now you probably want to do some configuration and provisioning using the rabbitmqctl command; but your RabbitMQ instance is up and running.

Update 2012-04-10: Updated these instructions to install RabbitMQ 2.8.1.  The later 2.7.x series have start-up script issues as those scripts use the "runuser" command which is not present on openSUSE.  Running the latest RabbitMQ is generally a good idea in any case,  recent versions have corrected several memory leaks and manage resources more efficiently.