Different Satellite Organization for a Development Environment?
I've been watching Thomas Cameron's Power User Tips and Tricks for Red Hat Satellite here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lxzHZesiB8
Watching it has raised a question for our group.
Within in VMWare vSphere, we have three environments, production, test and development for our RHEL Servers. We were wanting to be able to patch these different environment and Thomas talks about setting up different Organizations.
So it seems like instead of buying two more RH Satellite servers, we can create two other Organzations, as long as we have the entitlements and point them to those environments, correct?
Responses
Guru
6827 points
Hi Christopher,
I've done this for separate organizations. You can certainly define more organizations and then in the entitlements area of your Satellite server, distribute the entitlements as needed across the organizations you define. You will have to build trusts for the organizations. If you have custom software channels on the satellite server, you'll have to build a trust for the channels.
Another thing you can do, is create system groups between development/test and production, but under one organization. I have a test/development and production set of system groups defined for Satellite 5.7 (and this works for versions 5.5 (5.5 not supported), and version 5.6 as well)
With the advent of Satellite 6.x, you can create "veiws" analogous to a defined "database view". And then you can present software channels to the "views" you define (this is in the videos in the 2014 (and probably 2015) Red Hat Summit, and links are in this discussion https://access.redhat.com/discussions/735323, and also see this pdf. You can "promote" defined software channels through the "views" you have established, so you can take a specific software channel and have it graduate from development/test/production a step at a time.
The above being said, I have several organizations defined for specific needs as well. The organizations I have defined are for separate organizations instead of server roles. I've separated (for my largest customer) test/development/production by system groups on one network. We have eight satellite servers for various customers.
Hope this helps
Guru
6827 points
Chris, that sounds valid - on that note, We do not always necessarily clone a channel just for patching purposes. We will however incrementally patch a specific system group (dev/test/prod). However, in the discussions and in solutions etc, there are means to denote a specific version of RHEL (like maybe for a vendor support issue, you can't upgrade a set of systems to RHEL 6.6, but they must stay at RHEL 6.5 due to a 3rd party support issue, you can clone a specific date range for just RHEL 6.5 for that specific scenario I just mentioned).
We have identified system groups for our dev/test and prod systems and patch accordingly, and incrementally within each system group.
In Satellite 6.x, you will be able to create "views" of channels (analogous to a database view) which seems superior to having to go through the channel cloning bit. Then you can present and promote channels as they go through dev, test and lastly production.
Hope this helps
Guru
6827 points
Depending on the networking of a separate organization, you might have to create a custom bootstrap with it's own corresponding custom client-config-overrides.txt (I had to have the orgB_bootstrap.sh point to the specific, separate orgB_client-config-overrides.txt
- orgB_bootstrap.sh, properly define your ACTIVATION_KEYS for other organizations.
ACTIVATION_KEYS=[proper-key-for-other-organization]
## this file has a lot of entries
CLIENT_OVERRIDES=orgB-client-config-overrides.txt
Adjust host/networking directives in your orgB-client-config-overrides.txt if for some reason, the networking or domain name is different from where your satellite server exists (this may be rare, but keep in mind. We had it happen for us between two customers sharing one satellite server).
- Within the orgB-client-config-overrides.txt, make sure to point it to the proper satellite. Change the directives there, or enter direct IP addresses to make it resolve to the satellite server.
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