What you need to know to be ready for Satellite 6.4 and Puppet 5

As we work towards a Satellite 6.4 release this fall there are some very important changes to Puppet that are coming that the Satellite team wants to prepare you for.

Note: This affects ALL Satellite 6.3 users, even if you are not using Puppet or if you are using Puppet Enterprise.

The last few releases of Satellite have supported Puppet 3.8, a version which has been end-of-life since December 31, 2016.
Satellite 6.3 introduced support for Puppet 4, but since there were some major changes on the Puppet side between Puppet 3.8 and Puppet 4, Satellite 6.3 supported both versions.
But Puppet 4 is also rapidly approaching its end-of-life date, expected around October 2018.

The upcoming release of Satellite 6.4 will only support Puppet 5.
This is because the other versions that we mentioned, Puppet 3.8 and Puppet 4, will both be end-of-life (or near end-of-life) by the time of the Satellite 6.4 release date.

In order to upgrade to Satellite 6.4 from Satellite 6.3, you must first make sure that you have upgraded your Satellite 6.3 environment to Puppet 4.
If you try to upgrade from Satellite 6.3 with Puppet 3.8 the installed is expected to fail in order to ensure that the Puppet upgrade is also successful.

This is true even if you don't actively use Puppet.
For customers that have upgraded to Satellite 6.3, Puppet is not automatically upgraded to Puppet 4. This is because of the significant changes that Puppet has made between releases.

If you are a Puppet Enterprise user or you do not leverage the Puppet capabilities included with Satellite, this still impacts you too.
However, it should just be a simple upgrade of Puppet that is built into
Satellite, and should not affect your Puppet Enterprise operations.

Once you have made sure any Puppet scripts will work as expected, the upgrade itself from Puppet 3.8 to Puppet 4 is quite easy.
Enable the Puppet4 repos, then run the "satellite-installer" command with the "--upgrade-puppet" option. Full instructions are below.

If you haven't already started moving to Satellite 6.3, the feedback has been fantastic. It is a great release, and if you are running an older version of Satellite 6 we would encourage you to upgrade to Satellite 6.3 soon. While you're at it, upgrade to Puppet 4.

If you aren't leveraging Puppet in Satellite, then this shouldn't concern you much and it should be an easy upgrade (but you still need to do it).
However, if you are a heavy Puppet user, and are using the Puppet shipped as part of Satellite, it should be noted that Puppet changed significantly between versions 3.8 and 4. As a result, you should plan to test any of your Puppet based modules to be sure that they work properly after the upgrade.
Moving from Puppet 4 to 5 is much simpler and should require little changes to any of your modules.

Here are some resources that we thought would be particularly helpful when planning the upgrade from Puppet 3.8 to Puppet 4.

• Upgrading Puppet Section of the Upgrading and Updating Red Hat Satellite 6.3 Guide.
• Puppet 3.x to 4.x: Upgrade Puppet Server and PuppetDB
• Puppet 3.8.x to 5.x: Get upgrade-ready

Hopefully, these resources will help to get your Satellite 6.3 environment updated to Puppet 4.

Once you are at Satellite 6.3 and Puppet 4 you will be ready to upgrade to Satellite 6.4 and Puppet 5 when it is released this fall.