Satellite 6.3 Feature Overview: Puppet 4 Support

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Satellite 6.3 includes support for Puppet 4. Note that the Puppet 3 is the default option when installing Satellite 6.3.
Puppet has been a central feature of Satellite for many years, and upgrading the supported Puppet to version 4 helps to keep embedded Puppet relevant for customers using Puppet Open Source.

Puppet 4 brings many innovations to the Puppet Open Source environment, including but not limited to:

  • Puppet Server and static catalogs. The Clojure-based Puppet Server replaces the Apache+Passenger parts of the network stack. With it, one master serves more agents, faster.
  • Static catalogs optimize the most computationally expensive part of Puppet by reducing both the number of catalogs compiled and file checksum requests as the agents are applying their catalogs.
  • A completely rewritten parser, new constructs like iterators and lambdas, and an opt-in data type system all make for modules that do more with less work.
  • Improved error messages.
  • Structured facts allow you to access inventory data such as network interfaces more intuitively.
  • Resources apply in top-down order
  • All-in-one (AIO) package that includes Puppet 4, both Facter 2.4 and CFacter 0.4, the latest Hiera and MCollective, Ruby 2.1.5, OpenSSL 1.0.0r and gem dependencies.
  • Puppet Collections, a new way of delivering our open source software. A Puppet Collection is a package repository that ensures open source packages that are in a particular collection work together.

The entirety of differences between Puppet 3.8 and Puppet 4 is summarized at https://docs.puppet.com/puppet/4.0/release_notes.html

Support Status

Red Hat Satellite 6.3 supports Puppet 4 when the Satellite server is fully updated to the latest release of RHEL 7.

There are a few other items to consider when using Satellite with Puppet:

  • You can install Puppet 3 or Puppet 4, but not both on the same Satellite or Capsule.
  • Satellite Server and Capsule Servers can run different versions of Puppet.
  • You must not upgrade hosts to the Puppet 4 agent before their Satellite or Capsule Server
  • If you are mixing versions of Puppet, the versions of Puppet used need to match between the Satellite or Capule Server and the hosts using content views from that Satellite or Capsule Server. For example, If you have a Capsule Server using Puppet 4 and a host with Puppet 3.8 installed, the host will need to be upgraded to Puppet 4 in order for operations to work properly.
  • Installation of Puppet 4 agent will not be supported on system Z (S390X) servers.

Upgrade Notes

The default version of Puppet for Satellite 6.3 is Puppet 3.
The Upgrading and Updating Red Hat Satellite Guide describes the process of upgrading from Puppet 3 to Puppet 4.

Red Hat Satellite and Capsules do not need to be upgraded to Puppet 4 at the same time. You have the flexibility to upgrade Capsules depending on your progress with testing and upgrading Puppet modules. An alternative is to install new Capsules and move hosts to them after testing. You can use Satellite web UI, the Hammer CLI, or the bootstrap script to move hosts from a Puppet 3 Capsule to a Puppet 4 Capsule.

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