Questions and Answers from the February 2017 Satellite Ask-Me-Anything session

This article was originally published on the Red Hat Customer Portal. The information may no longer be current.

As promised, listed below are the responses to the questions we received in our Feb 2017 Satellite Ask Me Anything session.

AMA Feb Questions

January AMA Q&A: https://access.redhat.com/blogs/1169563/posts/2918221

Next steps: Create 2nd blog post before Tuesday AMA (linking to January Q&A as reference); Later in March, create Satellite 6 Technical FAQ

Content Views

Question: Does a composite content view duplicate all content in the content views it contains?
Answer: No. Content views (and composite views) are merely references to the content on disk. RPM are only stored once on disk. Each content view does having unique yum metadata, but this is measured in the 10s of megabytes.

Question: What are the best practices for creating a content view?
Answer: See 2015 - 10 Steps to Build an SOE: How Red Hat Satellite 6 Supports Setting up a Standard Operating Environment https://access.redhat.com/articles/1585273

Puppet

Question: Puppet Enterprise only supports integration with Satellite 6 for RHEL 7 or higher puppet masters. Is there any way for RHEL 6 PE users to integrate Satellite with Puppet Enterprise?

Answer: The integration module is available only for RHEL7 Puppet Masters.

Question: Is a Continuous Integration/Deployment Workflow possible with Jenkins, r10k and Git possible with Puppet in Satellite 6?

Answer: Yes. Take a look at the soe-ci to see an example of how one can implement a CI/CD workflow with Satellite 6 + Jenkins

Question: Is puppet required for provisioning?
Answer: No

Install & Upgrades

Question: I have upgraded my Satellite server from 6.1 to 6.2. However, when viewing my Satellite under access.redhat.com and Subscriptions, it still shows my Satellite Server as version 6.1. Is this serious?

Answer: It is not serious and you should not be concerned. This is a known bug that will be addressed in future releases of Satellite 6.

Question: How to automate the installation of RHEL in an environment where dns and dhcp already exists?

Answer: Simply do not install the DNS and DHCP components on the Satellite.

Question: We have a number of clients with hostnames that include underscores (''). These clients reported in fine to Satellite 6.1. In order to upgrade to 6.2, I had to delete them in order for the upgrade to be successful. I now find that I cannot add them back. What has changed and why?
Answer: In Satellite 6.0 and 6.1, there were two definitions of a host, one that was used for provisioning/configuration and another that was used for content/subscription. The content/subscription definition allowed hostnames that were arbitrary, and those could include shortnames & other characters (such as underscores). In Satellite 6.2, one of the major changes was that these definitions were unified, and all hostnames needed to be proper FQDNs. As part of bz1426424, bootstrap.py will allow you to supply an arbitrary hostname when registering that differs from your configured hostname.

Multi-Org

Question: We have certain organizations within our organization, which would like to manage their own hosts. How does this work in Satellite 6.x and what's needed to setup multi-org?

Answer: For each organization, you need to

• Create a subscription manifest in the Customer Portal
• Create a new organization in Satellite
• Import the subscription manifest.

Question: Is there a way to avoid duplication of sync'd repo data between organizations? We have multiple organizations, and each org seems to need a new copy of repos that are already present in other organizations.

Answer: RPMs are already deduplicated between organizations. However, each organization needs to 'sync' the repositories that they wish to use in order to get their own copy of them.

Disconnected Satellites

Question: My customer is air-gapped from the internet. How can I transfer patches/errata from one Satellite to customer air-gapped Satellite?

Answer: See Red Hat Satellite 6.2 Feature Overview: Inter-Satellite Sync

Question: If I have an air-gapped DMZ where I deploy a separate Satellite, will I need to get my subscriptions split as well?

Answer: Each Satellite will require its own subscription manifest. However, you only need to allocate the subscriptions required to manage each host to the respective Satellite.

Misc

Question: What do I need in Satellite 6 to execute remote commands on the guest?

Answer: SSH Keys need to be setup for each host. Many methods on how to deploy these keys are described in Making systems ready for Satellite 6.2's remote execution

Question: Any way to extract metadata from Foreman using either hammer or other utilities? I'd like to update our CMDB with this information.
Answer: Yes, depending on which data you are looking for, this will be accessible via hammer or via the API. Note: hammer can output to CSV, YAML or JSON.

Question: When should we expect system profile backup feature in Satellite 6?
Answer: This is currently not planned for an upcoming release of Satellite.

Question: What do I need to configure our install in order to enable reporting for all hosts under the Host tab?

Answer: Reporting refers to 'configuration management' reporting. Puppet needs to be installed for this.

Question: I just applied an errata to a group of systems and it broke and application. How do I figure out what packages were installed if I do not have a profile backup to compare?

Answer: Each job such as an errata installation submits a background task. You can view these tasks (via Monitor->Tasks) to see which packages were installed.

Question: We have several VMWare vCenters. What is your recommendation on creating Compute Resources? Should I create 1 Compute Resource for each vCenter?

Answer: Compute Resources only support a single vCenter, so 1 Compute Resource per vCenter.