Any entity — a physical or virtual machine — which is in the subscription service inventory and which can have subscriptions attached to it.

A subscription defines the products that are available, the support levels, the quantities (or number) of servers that the product can be installed on, architectures that the product is available for, content repositories which supply the product, and other information related to the products.

Assigning a subscription to a system.

A summary of the total number of subscriptions available to an organization, and the total number of subscriptions that are attached to Customer Portal Subscription Management, RHN Classic, and different subscription management applications.

A state for an organization when they have more subscriptions attached than they have purchased. This can occur when infrastructures are using both Customer Portal Subscription Management and RHN Classic to register systems, since they draw from the same subscription pools but use separate tallies.

A preference based on what service level to use for installed products.

A preference that restricts products and updates to a specific operating system minor release.

A local subdivision that contains a subset of subscriptions. This is a way to define a subscription structure that reflects the IT environment. An organization can be aligned with a physical location or an organizational division in a company.

Subscription and content services provided by Red Hat, rather than an on-premise application.

A subscription which has quantities that have not been attached to a system yet.

The hosted subscription management service. In this service, subscriptions are managed based on the product (and verified through issued certificates), rather than access to channels.

The Content Delivery Network.

A collection of packages based around a software product, a group of related products, or a version of product. The channel-based way of defining subscriptions is used only by RHN Classic.

Available and active subscriptions which match the architecture of the system.

Any entity — a physical or virtual machine, a domain, or a person — which is in the subscription management service inventory and which can have subscriptions attached to it.

Software downloads and updates.

The Red Hat-hosted content repositories and technology to deliver software, updates, and packages.

An X.509 certificate that contains a list of subscriptions for a system, including information about the products and quantities, content repositories, roles, and different namespaces.

An X.509 certificate which is issued to a system when the system is registered with the subscription management service. This certificate is used to authenticate and identify the system to the subscription management service.

A list of units (systems, domains, people, or applications) which have been registered to the subscription management service and a list of all subscriptions (current, expired, and future) which have been purchased by an organization.

A legal statement that defines how software can be used. Red Hat products are licensed under GPLv2. A subscription determines how many instances (quantities) or a product can be updated through Red Hat content streams and will be provided support but they do not restrict the ability to install or use software products.

The individual software product, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Directory Server.

An X.509 certificate that is generated and installed on a system once a product is installed. This contains information about the specific system that the product is installed on (such as its hardware and architecture) and the product name, version, and namespace. This identifies that specific product installation to the subscription management service and CDN.

To add a system (physical or virtual) to the subscription management service inventory.

The traditional RHN system. This will be available for a few years but is being phased out.

Whether all of the products installed on a system are fully covered with active subscriptions.

A set of tools used to view and attach subscriptions and to manage systems in the inventory. There are two Subscription Manager tools:

The backend server which interacts with the individual systems by creating an inventory of systems. It also keeps the inventory of subscriptions, including contracts, quantities, and expiration dates. When a new system is registered, when subscriptions are attached, and when products are installed. The subscription management service manages the changes and issues a corresponding X.509 certificate to the system to mark the change. The subscription management service also defines rules for products, such as hardware/architecture restrictions, to help with attaching subscriptions.

A specific certificate standard that is used to determine the format of certificates used for SSL communication and within a public key infrastructure. This is used to delineate the certificates used by the new subscription management service from the Satellite certificates used in the RHN Classic system.