Satellite 6.3.3 is now available

Satellite 6.3.3 has just been released.

The main driver for the 6.3.3 release is ongoing performance and stability improvements.
There are 24 bugs squashed in this release - the complete list is below.

The most notable issue is there was a critical Pulp maintenance routine that never executed that is now resolved with this update. 6.3.3 adds a weekly cron schedule to ensure execution of the maintenance job. For customers with large numbers of content hosts (10,000+) there may be a possible reduction in disk consumption in /var/lib/pulp after this maintenance task executes.

If you wish to find out how to reclaim this space, please open a support ticket for guidance

There is one erratum for the server [1] and one
for the hosts [2]. The install ISOs will be updated next week.

Customers who have already upgraded to Satellite 6.3 should follow the instructions in the errata.
Customers who are on older versions of Satellite should refer to the Upgrading and Updating Red Hat Satellite Guide.

You may also want to consider using the Satellite Upgrade Helper if moving from Satellite 6.x to Satellite 6.3.

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.

This update fixes the following bugs:

• There was a critical Pulp maintenance routine that never executed. This update adds a weekly cron schedule to ensure execution. (BZ#1609928)
• The Pulp regenerate applicability of consumer tasks took several minutes to complete. This update improves execution times. (BZ#1573892)
• With a large installation of around 20,000 content hosts, the Applicable Package List froze and the action consumed more resources than was necessary. (BZ#1608597)
• Uploading a package to a repository produced the error: NoMethodError: undefined method `to_hash'. (BZ#1583545)
• Host registration failed with the error: "Validation failed: Host has already been taken". (BZ#1605188)
• During a Content View publish, the Puppet module completed publishing before yum, causing provisioning problems. (BZ#1579381)
• The foreman-rake foreman_tasks:cleanup scripts did not remove tasks from foreman_tasks_locks table. (BZ#1585890)
• Docker registry sync did not use an HTTP proxy configuration, which left no route to the host for new Docker registries within a network. (BZ#1333595)
• When a custom certificate had non-unicode characters, users received UnicodeEncodeError during the CapsuleGenerateAndSync task. (BZ#1449418)
• The katello-restore script was not restoring full incremental backups. (BZ#1497858)
• While running katello-backup with a cron job, sudo required a tty. (BZ#1540382)
• Copying the activation key resulted in only a partial copy, the missing configuration information then caused failure with "undefined method" and Internal Server Error. (BZ#1553338)
• Trying to update the host produced an error: ERF42-6324 [Foreman::Exception]: Could not find network dvportgroup-56 on VMWare compute resource. (BZ#1557613)
• Running bootstrap script to migrate hosts failed with error: Content view cannot be blank. (BZ#1559703)
• The volume canceljobjob logging was reduced. (BZ#1563225)
• Users experienced Tomcat java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded. (BZ#1572604)
• Cannot edit user photos when using LDAP datasource. (BZ#1573243)
• Virtual Datacenter subscription was unavailable to hosts registering again. (BZ#1575056)
• Failed to delete hosts when the host name was missing from the Candlepin database. (BZ#1575140)
• The action history of Content Views was missing after upgrading to 6.3. (BZ#1575999)
• Exclude Satellite FQDN and localhost from possible proxying when a user set the foreman http proxy. (BZ#1585069)
• Qpidd deadlocked because of linearstore inactivity timer. (BZ#1588015)
• The foreman-rake katello:regenerate_repo_metadata command failed with "NoMethodError: undefined method `in_default_view' for #". (BZ#1589646)
• BZ - 1559703 - Running bootstrap fails: Content view can't be blank

[1] https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2018:2550

[2] https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2018:2551

Satellite Migration from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7

As a reminder, 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.

Future releases of Satellite (6.3 and above) 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.

Review the Satellite 6.2.13 release blog for more detailed information about moving your Satellite environment from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7. 6.2.13 includes some important features for capsule backup and recovery which helps to ease the movement from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7.