3.3. Customer Portal: Autoattaching Systems

Subscription management for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system has two steps to it: registering the system to a subscription service and then applying subscriptions for the operating system and products installed on that system. By default, when attaching subscriptions to a system through the Red Hat Subscription Manager UI on a system or through firstboot, these two steps are performed at the same time.
The Red Hat Subscription Manager configuration can point to any subscription server or content server. By default, it points to Red Hat's hosted services.
So, using the default configuration, then system is registered with Customer Portal Subscription Management hosted services and the best-matched available subscriptions are automatically attached to the system.

3.3.1. The Environment: Small Businesses

Hosted services are designed for IT environments where simplicity of deployment is the most important consideration. This is for small businesses or businesses with small Linux infrastructures:
  • Fewer than 20 Linux servers
  • Limited IT resources for system maintenance
  • No business need to create custom subscription or content utilities
  • Infrastructures already using RHN Classic hosted services for existing Linux systems
Hosted services make it easier to administer a small number of machines:
  • Simple to implement, since it uses the default system configuration
  • No additional software or hardware overhead
  • Possible to migrate to on-premise subscription/content services based on organization configuration later
  • The same subscription services for all systems, even if the systems are in different data centers or geographic locations
Hosted services do have some potential issues related to the overall network performance. As the IT infrastructure grows, then there could be local bandwidth or latency issues if a large number of systems are attempting to retrieve content or receive updates.

Note

Even if a small IT environment uses Red Hat hosted services at the start, it can be expanded to use on-premise subscription or content services in the future.

3.3.2. Workflow

Autoattach Process

Figure 5. Autoattach Process

When automatically attaching matched subscriptions (the default setting in the Red Hat Subscription Manager UI or --auto-attach with the subscription-manager command), there is only a single step to the registration process.

3.3.3. Options and Details

Most of the options are configuration settings that can be set after registration.
  • Attaching additional subscriptions, which is especially useful if the system is autoattached during firstboot, when subscriptions are only attached for the operating system.
  • Overriding system facts, which is used by the autoattach and healing processes to determine what the system architecture and hardware is for finding compatible subscriptions.
  • Setting a service level preference (this can also be done during registration, so it is used as one of the priorities when selecting subscriptions).
  • Setting a release preference, so that the system only updates for software targeted to that release version and ignores any upgrades to a later operating system version.
  • Enabling or disabling associated yum repos.