Satellite 6.2.13 is now available.

Red Hat Satellite 6.2.13 includes backup and restore capabilities for Capsule Servers, as well as other enhancements to make it easier to move the underlying Satellite operating system from a Red Hat ® Enterprise Linux ® 6 (RHEL 6) to a RHEL 7 environment. There are also enhancements to optimize package profile tasks, improvements to the pulp workers service, and documentation improvements.

One of the most critical improvements is Backup and Restore of Capsule Servers using the katello-backup and katello-restore scripts. These steps will be documented in the refreshed Satellite 6.2 Server Administration Guide. This will help ease the transition of your Satellite or Capsule Server from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7.

Customers who have already upgraded to 6.2 should follow the instructions in the errata. Customers who are on 6.1.x should follow the upgrade instructions in the Satellite 6.2 Installation Guide. Customers who have received hotfixes should verify the list below to ensure their hotfix is contained in the release before upgrading. Please reach out to Red Hat Support in these cases.

Satellite Migration from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7

Red Hat continues to strongly recommend your Satellite and Capsule Servers only be run on RHEL 7. There are several reasons why you should move your Satellite environment from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 including enhanced performance and long term supportability.

RHEL 7 has an improved kernel, newer versions of Ruby, and defaults to the XFS file system which provides better overall support for Satellite and Capsule Server operations. The combination of these updates to RHEL 7 result in significant increases in speed related to content focused.

Future releases of Satellite will only support RHEL 7 and above. In preparation for newer versions of Satellite you need to start thinking about how to move from older versions of RHEL to RHEL 7.
While RHEL 6 does support an in-place migration from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7, this migration mechanism is not supported when running Satellite on the RHEL host. Instead you will need to clone your Satellite environment from a host running RHEL 6 to another host running RHEL 7 .
The clone process at a high level requires backing up the Satellite Server or Satellite Capsule using the katello-backup script. Copy the backup files to the new host that is running RHEL 7, then restore using the katello-restore script.
For long term supportability, it is important to note that RHEL 6 is in production phase 3 of its life cycle, meaning the operating improvements that help make Satellite run so well on RHEL 7 are not going to be coming to RHEL 6.

To help make migration from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 an easier process, the Satellite 6.2.13 release adds the capability to use the katello-backup and katello-restore scripts on your capsule servers. This enables you to restore your Satellite server and Satellite capsules from a RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 Servers. Detailed steps on how to upgrade your Satellite or Capsule server to RHEL 7 are available in the refreshed Satellite 6.2 Administration Guide.