RH Satellite 6.2.6 - Keeping product subscriptions applied to rebuilt VM guests

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Hello,

We have guests that are receiving their RHEL licensing and content through the Virtual Datacenter licensing. It works fine as the guest registers to Satellite. However, we are currently applying a JBoss subscription to the guest manually. When my devOps team decides to rebuild the guest from VM template I have to go back and manually apply the JBoss license again. JBoss is included in the content view applied t the activation key that the guest registers to. But the guest cannot enable the JBoss repo until I manaully apply the subscription in the GUI.

How do I get the JBoss licensing and repos to apply to the guest every time it gets rebuilt in an automated fashion? We're trying to Chef all of our builds, and eventually applying updates through Chef, too. Is there a hammer command to add a subscription to a content host after it has registered, or have I missed a content view config from the beginning somehow?

Thanks in advance for any advice anyone may have,

Andy Torres

Responses

When (re)building guests, you may have to use greater than 1 activation key to achieve desired results. see Subscription-manager for the former Red Hat Network User: Part 9 - A Case Study with activation keys. for examples.

You'd probably want an

  • activation key to attach RHEL subscriptions (probably with auto-attach = True)
  • activation key to attach JBoss subs (probably with auto-attach = False).

(I suspect that your activation key has auto-attach set to True), and those Jboss subs aren't attaching because they exist on an activation key with RHEL subs (and auto-attach = True)

Regarding this:

Is there a hammer command to add a subscription to a content host 
after it has registered, or have I missed a content view config from 
the beginning somehow?

The hammer host subscription attach command will do this for you. (But I'd advise taking a look at the activation key approach first, as it would 'just work')

Thanks for your reply, Rich.

I spent some bomgar time with support and we ended up using one activation key for each registering VMWare guest. Some guests register with a key that has just RHEL VDC subscriptions added since that's all they need. Some guests register with a key that includes the VDC subscriptions and the JBoss subscriptions added. We manage the repo content allowed to the guests through whichever content views are promoted to their respective lifecycle environment. I just have to be cognizant of which published version each compond view is assigned.

Seems kinda clunky but I can work with it. We're still flushing out how we will use all of this with Chef, so there may be adjustments along the way.

If we used two keys as you described, how would each guest register to both at the same time? Some sort of "composite key" arrangement? Or would we need to do a register-update-reregister-update procedure to update RHEL and JBoss in succession?

Thanks again for your reply. Very helpful.

Andy

With multiple activation keys, you simply provide them comma separated. Example:

subscription-manager register --activationkey 'foo,bar,baz' 

Note, ordering does matter 'foo,bar,baz' will have different behavior than 'baz,bar,foo'

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