Red Hat Satellite and Puppet

Welcome to the second of our blog posts for Satellite. The topic this week is the usage of Puppet with Satellite 5 and 6. If you have not yet heard, Red Hat will be using and supporting Puppet as the configuration management platform within Satellite 6. The Puppet integration comes from many years of hands-on feedback and experiences within The Foreman community from users such as yourself.

As part of the Satellite 6 release process we had many customer discussions on the topic of Puppet. Puppet was enthusiastically received as part of the Satellite 6 release. There was also questions raised, such as:

• How do I move from my existing Puppet environment to Satellite 6?
• How can I use Puppet today with Satellite 5? (Then move to Satellite 6 in the future)
• What should I or should I not do today to move smoothly into a supported Satellite 6 Puppet environment?
• Do I use manifests or modules within Puppet?
• And more

As you can see there is some interesting topics. Based on this feedback and with an aim to provide answers we created a technical document that gives some recommendations and guidance. This document is split into two main sections.

Section 1: Satellite 5 and Puppet

For existing Satellite 5 customers, being able to use Puppet in a manner that won’t conflict with Satellite 6 is an importance. Since Puppet is not supported with Satellite 5, we give information on how the two can work side-by-side. Additionally within this section of the guide we go over many topics, including using general best practices for Satellite deployment with management of 3rd party content. The end result is to have a Puppet master on another system, Satellite correctly configured to automatically associate systems to the Puppet master at time of provisioning, and showing how you can use Satellite 5 as a basic External Node Classifier for the Puppet master.

Section 2: Satellite 6 and Puppet

For anyone looking to adopt Satellite 6 in the near future and who already have an existing Puppet environment we provide guidance on how Satellite 6 will interact with Puppet and any dos and don’ts to avoid potential headaches when moving over to Satellite 6. This will allow our future Satellite 6 customers to make informed decisions for any changes that they want to do today in preparation for moving to Satellite 6.

We hope this sounds interesting to you. If so, please read more here:

• Red Hat Satellite 5 and 6 Puppet Guide