Activation Key

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Hi

I am trying to understand if there is a benefit in using an Activation Key created in the RHSM portal. When first reading about Activation Keys it was my understanding that one could assign a "Usage Limit" to the key. However this option is not available in the RHSM portal so I am assuming this must be a satellite only feature?

The possible benefits listed in the portal are: -

  • You don't have to enter your Red Hat login and password.

We will be using Chef to perform the registration so the credentials are inside an encrypted data bag populated from a secure password store so this should not be a problem for us.

  • Instead of having to run multiple commands to register a system, you can just use one command.

    It refers to having to run multiple commands to register a system, list available subscriptions and attach them to the system and enable repositories in those subscriptions.

Currently we are only running the register command with username, password and --auto-attach and that has worked for us so far. I did list all repos and there are quite a few, most likely not going to be needed and possibly therefore not wanting to enable all of these automatically anyway.

What I was hoping to do was control license usage in some way, rather than just using the --auto-attach option. With this option systems are just registered until license exhaustion accross all subscriptions. I was hoping with Activation Key I could assign a number of licenses to say a product team, maybe a separate key for production and UAT and then that team could only every register a set number of systems.

Appreciate any wisdom and advice offered!

Geoff

GC

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