3.3. The Transitioning Workflow

The transitioning workflow consists of two main phases, each consisting of several steps. These are described in the following sections.
Preparing for Transition

The preparation phase consists of the following steps:

  1. Install Satellite 6.
  2. Navigate to the Red Hat Customer Portal and create a manifest for each organization that you are going to import.
  3. Download those manifests to the Satellite 6 instance.

    Important

    Rename each manifest according to the organization for which it is intended. That is, ORG_NAME.zip.
  4. Use the hammer import organization command to import your organizations and their manifests. For example: 
    # hammer import organization --csv-file /tmp/exports/users.csv --upload-manifests-from /root/manifest-dir

Performing the Transition

After you have completed the steps described in Preparing for Transition, the Satellite 6 instance is ready to accept transition data. This phase consists of the following steps:

  1. Export the entities (metadata and content) from an installed Satellite 5 system, using tools installed on the Satellite 5 server machine.
  2. Transfer the exported entities to the Satellite 6 instance, using SCP, a USB device, or other suitable means.
  3. Import the Satellite 5 entities, using tools installed on the Satellite 6 server machine.
  4. Tune the Satellite 6 configuration to suit your deployment.

The existing spacewalk-report tool extracts most of the information from the Satellite 5 instance. Several new reports have been added, as well as two new tools that are used as part of the export process:
  • spacewalk-channel-export: This tool exports channel data and metadata beyond that available at the report level.
  • spacewalk-export: This tool is a wrapper that combines the various export processes into a single tool, and packages the resulting export data into a single data set that can be transferred to the Satellite 6 system.
The existing hammer tool has been extended with a new plug-in. This plug-in is compatible with the Satellite 5 export data format, and accesses the Satellite 6 instance using its public API. The import tools track which Satellite 5 entities have been mapped to which Satellite 6 entities. This means you can run the import tools multiple times without duplicating entities.