Satellite 6 is Here… We Hope You Enjoy It
The Satellite Team is proud to announce the release of Satellite 6.0. This release is the culmination of several years of collaboration between some incredibly active open source communities, many savvy and technically strong customers, and a very passionate Red Hat engineering team. We have worked together upstream, and downstream through two Managed Design Programs, and two beta cycles. First and foremost, thank you for your efforts and the feedback which have helped us to deliver this next generation Linux System Management tool. We are very excited, and we cannot wait to hear your feedback. This article will provide you a quick summary of the release and provide you some history of how the product evolved.
Satellite 6 Feature Overview
The term “Systems Management” can be very broad and means different things to everyone. For Satellite 6, we have focused on four main management areas:
- Content Management: Mirror your content and configuration and determine which machines in which locations should consume which content.
- Configuration Management: Define configuration policies for machines and ensure compliance to those policies
- Provisioning: Use system definitions to build machines on bare metal, virt fabrics, and in the cloud
- Subscription Management: Track your subscriptions from the order, to the machine which is consuming it
Before we give the you the details of what is really new in this release, we would like to explain how Satellite 6 evolved. Satellite 6 has two real back stories, one is around The Foreman (Provisioning and Configuration Management) and the other around Katello (Content and Subscription Management).
The Foreman
Foreman started 5 years (0.1 was release at September 10 2009) ago by Ohad Levy. Its primary aim was to simplify IT management for system administrations, building on top of his experience as a system administrator. Foreman filled in the gaps between provisioning, configuration management, and large scale deployments in the enterprise, cloud or in an combined environment. Over time, Foreman grew to support multiple use cases, ranging from virtualization and cloud deployments, to auditing, pluggable, high availability, and support really large scale deployments. Today Foreman is known as one of the top 10 open source management software for IT infrastructure.
Katello
If you have ever seen one of Thomas Cameron's talks on Satellite, you know there is lots of great institutional knowledge on using channels in Satellite 5. Members of the engineering team consulted with many different Satellite customers and had them walk through how they used Satellite in their day-to-day jobs. What came out was a very consistent set of stories around needing to sync content without using it, define static sets of content, and then promote that content through various environment in order to test and verify the work. These stories turned into the Katello project which is used for the content and subscription management pieces of Satellite
Bringing them Together
These two projects, along with their dependent projects Puppet, Pulp, and Candlepin form the basis of Satellite 6. Here is what the architecture looks like:
This is what was developed upstream and what hundreds of customers tested as part of the various Managed Design Programs and Satellite 6 Beta Programs.
Satellite 6 New Features
A community driven provisioning tool and a customer driven content tool were combined to give Satellite users lots of new and exciting features.
New Content Management Features
- Mirroring all software into a Definitive Software LIbrary before being used.
- Defining Content Views to ensure that machines of a given type always get the same version of the content
- Custom Environment lifecycles to support Development to Production application lifecycles
- Support for RPM and non RPM content, starting with Puppet Modules
- Combined views of Red Hat and Custom Products
New Configuration Management Features
- Policy based Configuration Management using Puppet
- Drift Detection against puppet policies
- Integration of Configuration and Content into single views
New Provisioning Features
- Provisioning Templates combining managed content and configuration policy
- Provisioning support of Bare Metal plus RHEV, OpenStack, EC2, and other platforms
- Discovery ISO images to bring machines into inventory, and provision later
- Tools to generate bootdisks which allow for PXE and PXEless provisioning
New Subscription Management Features
- Tracking of contracts and service levels at an individual machine level
- Visibility into the usage of subscriptions, and subscription end dates
- Direct Access to Red Hat Customer Portal knowledge base
New Infrastructure Features
- Robust Role Based Access Controls
- Kerberos SSO integration
- REST API
- Command Line tool with UI parity
- Scale and Federation using Capsules
- Multi-tenancy with support for many customer accounts in one Satellite
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It would be nice to see what people with deeply entrenched Puppet installations will be doing to pivot into using Satellite 6's Puppet Master.
Also - does this mean the spacewalk project is legacy now or will the orchestration parts of Satellite 6 be the new "Spacewalk" upstream?
Spacewalk, and it's vibrant community, will continue to be the upstream for Satellite 5.x.
OK - is there an upstream for Satellite 6 or is this a closed product?
Thanks!
There are several upstreams. Start with katello (http://www.katello.org/) and foreman (http://www.theforeman.org/). That will also get you to pulp for content management (http://www.pulpproject.org/) and candlepin (http://www.candlepinproject.org/)
-- bk
I more meant is there an upstream for the glue that puts those projects together into Satellite 6. Spacewalk looks like Satellite 5.x. Those projects, installed side-by-side, I have to assume would not look like Satellite as the UI magic wouldn't be there - right? Or does Katello contain that web UI glue?
We're familiar with Foreman and Puppet but I've never seen Katello.
Thanks!
Katello is the glue you are looking for.
Thanks for sorting me out.
Thanks for the info Bryan.
Are the Puppet integration components available upstream (ie. is there more than what is included in Foreman)?
I was contemplating between installing Red Hat Satellite 5.6 and Satellite beta 6, so I guess I’m going with Satellite 6 now. My question is; could all of it be install on a single machine? In other words, how many servers do I need? And can they be VMs?
From what I've read from the manuals on 6 so far it's an all-in-one arrangement - but you could always use an external managed DB.
cool,
thanks,
You can install a single machine which is both a Satellite and a Capsule. It can be a VM, but keep in mind you a syncing alot of contnet so it will need to have beefy storage.
I was thinking of giving the VM 250Gigs of storage space. Do you think that's enough or should I give it more space?
Depends on the channels you need - we use a 1.2TB LUN to support AS4-EL7
...And that doesn't include a couple hundred gigs for PGSql DB and local backups...
Wow, I didn't realizes it was going to require that much space.
Thanks for the info,
Well, just don't sync so many channels (or whatever Satellite 6 is calling them now...)
For RHEL 7 server + RHEL 6 server (both with kickstart trees) + OpenStack 5 we are consuming around 65 GB in /var/lib/pulp (repos) and 10 GB in /var/lib/mongodb (repo related database).
Is Satellite 5.7 like right around the corner now? I know you won't say a date but maybe a quarter? (like Q1 15?)...
We do have a planned Satellite 5.7 release which the Satellite team is working towards. I cannot disclose dates in a public forum such as this. Please contact your Red Hat account rep who may be able to privately provide more details.
Regards,
Cliff
we are just beginning our puppet installation, would we be better to abandon the rollout and upgrade to satellite 6 or is an install of puppet give us any additional benefit?
I would be interested to hear what the @Redhat folks have to say about this - I would assume you'll probably just want to switch gears to Satellite 6 rather than having to roll-in your Puppet stuff later on - maybe Redhat has a tool that makes it easy though?
I bet a lot of us already have Puppet installations that need to be rolled into Satellite 6.
Our migration to Satellite 6 will be much tougher because we needed version control and have Subversion built into our workflow.
Actually there does appear to be some guidance for both of us:
https://access.redhat.com/blogs/1169563/posts/1177083
Please take a review of https://access.redhat.com/articles/1138393 - which is an overview of puppet and usage within Satellite 6. It also gives advice on if you was looking to deploy puppet + Satellite 5.6. It is likely best to discuss with your account rep or solution architect as they will likely be most familiar with your deployment today and environment. Satellite 6 is brand new and well worth a look today. Puppet stand-alone is not supported by Red Hat, but you could deploy it in a manner that should allow you in the future to switch over to Satellite 6 and its built-in puppet infrastructure. In short, no easy answer - especially when I'm not familiar with your account, your needs long term and short term. I would though strongly suggest to give Satellite 6 a review if you are still in a preproduction stage of potential deployments.
Regards,
Cliff
Hey Guys,
It's exciting to here that Satellite 6 released, we are new to satellite, but we have been trying to figure out the best way to manage stuff like software contents, repos, subscription and system configurations, we have tested katello a little bit on version 1.4, but it seems to have a few bugs and then now we can give it try on satellite 6.
A quick question here, it may sounds a bit stupid, don't laugh at me. As our environment is kinda hybrid we have RHEL and CentOS, does satellite 6 support such environment?
I'd like to use mock for our rpm builds but it needs a common http repo. Is it possible to access the Satellite's repos via http with version 6?
More info: https://access.redhat.com/solutions/367683
Any way this might be usable: https://github.com/theforeman/foreman_salt/wiki
Can I install the plugin in Satellite 6 ?
Seems other people want salt support as well
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1139727
Marcel:
I would expect to see that in future releases. Salt is a plugin, and therefore should work but we have not verified it with thev ersion we have delivered.
There has been mention of satellite 5.7 coming soon but at what stage will satellite 5.x be retired. I know there is a life cycle for these products but my question is more around if satellite 6 should only be used going forward for any new customer deployments. It might be a stupid question but i just want to make sure im recommending the correct solution to customers going forward, i really dont want them using the 5.x version if its going to retire anytime soon.
Hi there Justin,
I do not know your role, but if you have access to a Red Hat representative, such as a Solutions Architect I'd recommend to discuss this in earnest with them to ensure we understand your specific needs and can give recommendations.
The Satellite Life Cycle documents are public and can be viewed here:
* https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/satellite/
The general usage of Satellite 5 is until 2017, with an ELS stream available until 2019. We are giving existing and new customers who move from 5.x to 6.x plenty of time for long term planning.
Regards,
Cliff
Justin,
I personally don't see a good reason for deploying 5.x in new customer deployments, and would personally suggest any new installations be on 6.x.
My primary reason for this is that the workflow elements and patching/configuration through life cycle stages (and lifecycle management) is different enough between products that it isn't something I would want to 're-do' for an upgrade in the future. I would also take into consideration the need to change established standard work procedures when the system is upgraded from 5.x to 6.x in the future.
That's my thoughts.. if there is something I'm missing in regards to continued use of 5.x in new deployments i'm keen to hear it!
I agree with those thoughts, i really just wanted to fully understand why 6.x should be used only going forward.
Thanks for your input.
Hi, Guys,
I met some problem while evaluating Satellite 6, when I want to add/import puppet class, why I can't see any puppet classes that I can choose to import, my thought is that once I created a puppet module repo under product submenu, the puppet class can be recognized automatically, can someone please point me to the right direction?
Thanks
You probably need to add it ot the content views. If you come find us on #theforeman-dev or #satellite6 on freenode we can help out real time.