Request any lessons learned building Satellite 6 server

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Dear Community,

We are going to build some Red Hat Satellite version 6.current servers using RHEL 7.current.

We'd greatly appreciate any good lessons learned, particularly things not really clearly covered in the standard documentation.

Our satellites will be "disconnected" (we will download ISO channel dumps and ingest manually) and we won't have any immediate need for capsules. We're going to have many RHEL 7 clients and yet are still going to support some RHEL 6 clients.

If you have time, any lessons you've learned or tips you could provide learned through the school of hard knocks would be appreciated.

Thanks
p.s.
I'm switching accounts, I'm The Caffeinated Developer in the post below

Responses

Appreciate any help

I'm switching accounts, I'm The Caffeinated Developer above

We have deployed Satellite 6.x three times at one site and each time we have given up on it. The site is currently disconnected using content ISOs, which was broken (not implemented) in Satellite 6.x when testing. That aside, we found porting work processes across ended up in processes that were more complex/convoluted than using Satellite 5.x.

I wrote a bit in the Satellite threads about issues we were having at the time. Also investigated replacing Puppet Enterprise with Satellite 6 and just didn't see any major benefit/reason to move.

Example: https://access.redhat.com/discussions/2114791

I am keen to hear your feedback on it. When discussing it with other admins locally, they are having similar pain in doing anything beyond very basic workflows/patching (like those used in the demos). I will admit, I haven't tried again with the latest releases and it's probably time to try it again.

This thread is good therapy: https://www.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/4y7ggs/red_hat_satellite_6_are_you_unhappy_or_is_it_just/

With regards to the disconnected workflows, there have been some significant improvements with Satellite 6.2. Prior to 6.2 our options for populating disconnected Satellite was somewhat limited. We had (the now deprecated) katello-disconnected and content ISOs (and content ISOs didn't exist with 6.0). Satellite 6.2 has Inter-Satellite Sync which may be useful for you. The idea being that you can use a Satellite on the internet connected side to sync & export content for the disconnected Satellites. But it does require another Satellite,

We still have Content ISOs and are continuing to release those for products not covered. Content ISOs on their own require a little bit of massaging so that you can leverage them in a disconnected environment. Take a look at Subscription-manager for the former Red Hat Network User: Part 7 - understanding the Red Hat Content Delivery Network, which covers this.

Rich,

You no doubt cringe every time you have to deal with a post I make about Satellite 6, but I still feel our views on its practical capabilities (ie. adding value to business process) are very different.

In this instance the issue was that the customer didn't want to run a second Satellite outside the firewall and sync, they wanted to continue syncing content ISOs. From memory one of the major issues was that the content ISOs were no longer provided as diffs so even a minor update in packages would required re-downloading the entire set of ISOs, has this been resolved?

Another major concern was the behaviour of virt-who and how much information it was unecessarily collecting/forwarding. It's been too long for me to remember the specifics, but again.. from memory it was enumerating the entire ESX cluster (120 physical hosts) and forwarding details for all hosted VMs back (needed clarity on if this information was also being forwarded back up to Red Hat ie. outside the network).

It's probably time to try it again (before the jettisoned licenses expire!), so I will reserve any other comments I have.

Pixel, Rich, thanks much for the good feedback. Based on the consternation & pain I recall you and others experienced, we delayed Satellite 6 until ... now. I'm going to look through your bits above and thanks again!

R. Hinton (new account)

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