Chapter 1. What Satellite Server and Capsule Server do

Red Hat Satellite is a system management solution that enables you to deploy, configure, and maintain your systems across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Satellite provides provisioning, remote management and monitoring of multiple Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments with a single, centralized tool. Red Hat Satellite Server synchronizes the content from Red Hat Customer Portal, and provides functionality including fine-grained life cycle management, user and group role-based access control, integrated subscription management, as well as advanced GUI, CLI, and API access.

Red Hat Satellite Capsule Server mirrors content from Red Hat Satellite Server to facilitate content federation across various geographical locations. Host systems can pull content from the Capsule Server and not from the central Satellite Server. The Capsule Server also provides localized services such as Puppet Master, DHCP, DNS, or TFTP. Capsule Servers assist you in scaling your Satellite environment as the number of your managed systems increases.

Capsule Servers decrease the load on the central server, increase redundancy, and reduce bandwidth usage. For more information see the Red Hat Satellite Architecture Guide.