3.5. Preparing for the Transition

The transition tools and process assume the following conditions are true:
  • A fully-functional Satellite 5.6 or 5.7 instance exists.
  • Satellite 6 has been correctly installed on a new machine.
  • Direct connectivity between the Satellite 5 and Satellite 6 instances cannot be guaranteed.
  • The Satellite 6 instance contains a manifest that enables access to the same content that the Satellite 5 instance accesses, for the same number of client machines.
  • The Satellite 6 instance has already synchronized the desired Red Hat content. The transition tools make every attempt not to copy Red Hat content from Satellite 5 to Satellite 6.
  • The export tools execute on the Satellite 5 system. This is necessary to allow direct access to the Satellite 5 database, repositories, and existing tools such as spacewalk-report.
  • The import tools execute on the Satellite 6 system, for similar reasons.
  • The result of importing Satellite 5 data is not a perfectly-configured Satellite 6 instance. The goal is to alleviate as much set-up as reasonably possible, given the differences in data-models and functionality between Satellite 5 and 6.

3.5.1. Preparing the Satellite 5 Server for Transition

Preparing your Satellite 5 server for transition requires that you subscribe to some specific channels and download extra packages to ensure that your transition runs smoothly. This is described in the following sections.
Installing the Latest Reporting Packages

Install the latest spacewalk-reports and spacewalk-utils packages from the Satellite 5.6 or 5.7 channel. 

# yum install spacewalk-reports spacewalk-utils
The latest spacewalk-report package provides additional reports which are used by the transition tools:
  • activation-keys
  • channels
  • config-files-latest
  • kickstart-scripts
  • repositories
  • system-profiles
You can run the spacewalk-report command to confirm the addition of these new reports.
The spacewalk-utils package provides two additional command-line tools, which are used by the transition tools: /usr/bin/spacewalk-export and /usr/bin/spacewalk-export-channels.

Note

The spacewalk-reports package is fully supported by Red Hat and provides additional reports designed for use by the spacewalk-export tools. You can also use these reports for general, day-to-day reporting.
Installing Extra Transition Packages

Ensure your Satellite 5 server is subscribed to the RHN Tools channel. This channel provides the latest updates to the subscription-manager and python-rhsm packages, which are required to install the subscription-manager-migration command.

Install the subscription-manager and python-rhsm packages: 
# yum install subscription-manager python-rhsm

3.5.2. Preparing the Satellite 6 Server for Transition

To prepare the Satellite 6 server for transition, ensure the rubygem-hammer_cli_import package is installed. If necessary, run yum install rubygem-hammer_cli_import to install it from the Satellite 6 repositories.
Run the following command to verify that the transition tools were successfully installed: 
# hammer import --help
Usage:
    hammer import [OPTIONS] SUBCOMMAND [ARG] ...