Hi Dorothy,

For RHEL this is a hard question. For RHEL has two support models. a) continous upgrades so you keep updating from RHEL 6.0 to 6.1 ..... until now RHEL 6.9 in your setup this could be done by registering servers to RHSM network. Best through a network proxy.

b) Using an EUS subscription where you get only critical security or major bugfixes for the installed RHEL release. This is also best managed via RHSM.

CentOS is a complete different story, for it is not a Red Hat supported product. I do not have any experience with their patch management service.

3) You need prove that each server has a subscription RHSM is only one of several ways. RHSM creates a server profile that might be of some help for Red Hat support. You do not need it for patch downloads.

4) What I did in a small demo environment? I installed one server with all products that I need, and used a) repo-sync to download all the patches to a webdirectory (running an Apache webserver on the repository server). b) run createrepo to update the repository metadata c) have all RHEL systems point to the webdirectory of my repository server via a file in /etc/yum.repo.d I only used the current RHEL release at that time for all demo servers.

5) I am unable to point you to it, for I use a Satellite 6.2.12 server now a days.

Be aware there is a special Satellite subscription for environments with a few Linux servers. On Red Hat Sales training we learn that a 10 to 20 clients it gets interesting to use Satellite already instead of doing your own manual patching. With some help you can also synchronize CentOS repositories to help your patch management.

Regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra