Chapter 4. New Features and Enhancements
This chapter introduces new features in Red Hat Satellite 6.6.
- SWID passthrough
- When repositories contain SWID data, Red Hat Satellite 6.6 mirrors this data and persists it across all Content Views even when filtering.
- Warnings for
yum
transactions when upgrading -
When updating or upgrading with
satellite-maintain
, you are now warned before ayum
transaction runs, and can cancel the action to take appropriate steps, if required. satellite-maintain
alias added-
The
satellite-maintain
alias has been added for theforeman-maintain
command. - Bypass exclusion when upgrading
-
When excluding packages from
yum
updates, if any of the excluded packages are from required Satellite repositories theyum
update can fail with dependency issues. To avoid this issue,satellite-maintain
can now bypass exclusion when running theyum
update, to avoid cases when exclusion was configured and forgotten. - Support for Ansible 2.8
- Red Hat Satellite 6.6 supports Ansible version 2.8. Ansible 2.6 reaches its end-of-life (EOL) in 2019.
- Support for Ansible variables
- Ansible variables are now supported on a similar level as smart class parameters for Puppet. Ansible manifests are scanned to determine what variables are available and allow you to import them. The Ansible variables can then be adjusted (for example, to set the correct type) and overwritten in the same way as for Puppet.
- Order of Precedence for Ansible variables
-
In previous versions of Satellite, the Ansible Keyword
become_user
was used to escalate Ansible roles to theEffective User
when a user required elevated privileges such as overriding Ansible variables. Satellite 6.6 supports the Ansible variable order of precedence for overriding variables. If you have existing Ansible roles that use the Ansible Keywordbecome_user
to escalate user privilege and override variables, you must reconfigure these roles to follow the order of precedence. For more information, see Variable precedence: Where should I put a variable? in the Ansible User Guide. - Support for Ansible Runner
-
In Red Hat Satellite 6.6 you can set Ansible Runner as the default method for running Ansible jobs, instead of calling
ansible-playbook
directly. Ansible Runner is the recommended way to run Ansible jobs. - OpenSCAP deployment using Ansible
- Previously you could not deploy OpenSCAP without Puppet. Red Hat Satellite 6.6 now supports deploying OpenSCAP with Ansible and reporting on hosts without using Puppet.
- Resolved a
virt-who
report issue -
Previously, when sending a
virt-who
report to Satellite a short time after a previous one (even from a different set of hypervisors), Satellite’s task would fail onundefined method '[]' for nil:NilClass
. This issue has now been resolved. virt-who
configuration plug-in enhancementsRed Hat Satellite 6.6 provides simpler and less error-prone configuration of
virt-who
with the following additional settings:- You can now set shorter intervals than one hour (for example: 1 minute VIRTWHO_INTERVAL) through a configurable option.
-
The
virt-who-configure-plugin
now sets ‘NO_PROXY=*’ by default, which allows Satellite to successfully reach the Content Delivery Network.
- Support for Red Hat Virtualization version 4 API
- Red Hat Virtualization version 4 API integration was added in Satellite 6.4 as a Technology Preview. It is now fully supported in Red Hat Satellite 6.6.
- New task dashboard
- Red Hat Satellite 6.6 provides a task page that includes a dashboard with an emphasis on paused tasks and tasks with errors or warnings. This provides a better graphical status of the tasks.
- Task notification enhancements
Red Hat Satellite 6.6 includes the following enhancements when a paused task occurs in the system:
-
In the web UI, the
admin
user receives a notification about the current number of paused tasks in the system, and can navigate directly from the notifications area to the list of paused tasks. - In the web UI, the user that initiated the task receives a notification about the specific task being paused, and can navigate directly from the notifications area to the details of the task, and to the Red Hat Knowledgebase article for troubleshooting.
-
In the web UI, the
- Task logging enhancements
- Red Hat Satellite 6.6 now logs better details about the state change of a task (for example, paused or stopped tasks), including the task ID, execution plan ID, new state, and result.
- All Satellite and Capsule Servers log to
rsyslog
-
For consistency, all Satellite Servers and Capsule Servers now log by default to
rsyslog
. - Support for cloud-init
-
Red Hat Satellite 6.6 includes the
foreman-userdata
plug-in that provides support for deployments usingcloud-init
. - Creating Content Views with dependency resolution
- When creating a Content View filter, you can add or remove arbitrary packages and errata to or from a Content View. Dependency resolution is now completed on the resultant repositories.
- Default scale setting enhancements
Red Hat Satellite 6.6 includes the following enhancements to its default behavior:
-
Satellite now includes a set of predefined
custom-heira.yaml
templates for various memory and size configurations. These templates provide recommended pre-configured tuning settings that you can use instead of reading a tuning guide and making changes manually. For more information, see Tuning Satellite Server with Predefined Profiles in Installing Satellite Server from a Connected Network. - The cleaning unused tasks feature is now enabled by default. This reduces performance issues, disk consumption, and increases success with upgrades. For more information, see Configuring the Cleaning Unused Tasks Feature in Administering Red Hat Satellite.
-
Satellite now includes a set of predefined
- Reporting enhancements
Red Hat Satellite 6.6 includes the following enhancements to the reporting engine added in Satellite 6.5:
- A new applied errata reporting template
- The ability to schedule reports
- The ability to email reports
- Support for provisioning on Google Compute Engine
Red Hat Satellite 6.6 supports Google Compute Engine (GCE) as a provisioning platform, including the following features:
- Creating a GCE compute resource
- Image-based provisioning using that compute resource
- Sending updates from a Satellite Server on-premise using a VPN
Decommissioning GCE virtual machines
Support for the CLI and API will be added in a later release of Red Hat Satellite.
- Composer integration
- With Composer integration in Red Hat Satellite 6.6, you can download content from Satellite in order to build images for deployment. You can then upload the deployment images into Satellite and use Satellite to provision these images.
- Kickstart default provisioning template enhancements
-
The new option
fips_enabled
is introduced, which ensures that FIPS-related packages are installed. -
The kickstart statement
repo
can be modified with theproxy_string
variable. -
If a
%post
snippet error occurs, the error is reported in the host’s status in the Satellite web UI. -
The
Kickstart default custom post
snippet is automatically added to the%post
section of the template without the need to change the template itself.
-
The new option