Documentation and Suggestion for transitioning from Spacewalk to Red Hat Satellite 6

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We are managing Red Hat servers via Spacewalk and trying to transition to Satellite 6. We have already purchased the required subscription and set up the test server. looking at some documents from Red Hat, the transition process looks very complicated as currently we have dev, test and prod servers on Spacewalk. Is there any updated document on this topic from Red Hat? Also, what type of support does Red Hat provide for this particular transition task? Any suggestion would be appreciated. Thank you.

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There is SOE document to ease your transition, note that transition is not an apple to apple transition. You need to leave Spacewalk philosophy behind and get used to Foreman, Puppet etc i.e Satellite 6.

SOE document: https://access.redhat.com/articles/1585273

I think the main things to know are:

IMO, mastering these tools are the most important parts of transitioning data and systems from Satellite 5 to Satellite 6. Knowing what they do and how they work will significantly help with the transitioning process.

Having said that, I should echo Muhammad's sentiment: how Satellite 6 works is different in many ways to Satellite 5. Very different architecture and a lot of new features that Satellite 5 doesn't have.

Other things to note: 1. You need a separate puppet build server. Sat 5 kept the configs in the server. Sat 6 has to import the configs.

  1. You REALLY need to have puppet built and configured before using the Bootstsrap script. Even --skip-puppet doesn't help. It crashes hard and your system gets stuck in a partially registered state that you cannot delete.

  2. If you are not ready for puppet and you need systems migrated, it is MUCH easier to manually disable the connection to 5 and manually register to 6.

  3. Extra work if you have not moved from classic to subscription management yet.

  4. Errata management is much, much, much more complicated and there is not a lot of good documentation on it. I have run into several brick walls and found the answers only here in the community.

As for support, my experience has been less than good. Often I am told to do something that looks like it won't work. When I do it and it doesn't work, then they start looking deeper in to the issue.

If I wasn't being forced into Sat 6, I wouldn't use it. Your experience may be better since Sat 6 is designed for having multiple Environments such as dev, test, qa, uat and production. We don't use or need those environments, so the overhead management in Sat6 is very frustrating.

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