Red Hat Network Satellite implementation for dummies
Good morning all;
We have installed Network Satellite on rhel 6.2 64bit version of the os. We have 100 linux installations mostly 5.8 there are some 6.2 installations as well. Would like to divide the our environment into four groups, dev, qa, uat and prod. The goal would be to patch dev and qa and then a week later patch uat and prod servers with the same group of rpm's. At this point we have not configured the satellite installation.
Wondering if anyone out there would be willing to share their implementation steps. Any documentation suggestions would be welcomed as well.
Thank you for your input;
Norm
Responses
Cloned channels are how most people accomplish this. You can manually create a cloned channel for each environment and then, as systems move from one environment to another, you simply change the base channel entitlement in Satellite (you can use System Groups to accomplish this for a group of machines for convenience) from one clone channel to another.
For example, if you stabilize on RHEL 6.2 you could create:
rhel-6.2-dev
rhel-6.2-qa
rhel-6.2-uat
rhel-6.2-prod
Cloned channels do *not* update packages or errata on each satellite-sync, which means:
-- Packages are stable, so you don't need to worry about version creep with packages
-- Package maintenance and errata maintenance is a manual process.
The docs are a good reference point, but if you want to see how the pieces can fit together you can review this Summit presentation from 2010:
This is aimed at a more experienced user, but the basics are solid for review. Specifically:
-- Slide 29-34 for System Groups
-- Slide 35+ for Cloned channels
Between the presentation and the docs that should give you a good framework to define what will work for your company.