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Chapter 1. Introduction to Red Hat Subscription Management
While Red Hat products are available through a GNU Public License, Red Hat supports its products through a subscription-based license. Support includes:
- Downloadable content and updates
- Access to the knowledge base
- Support for your product
You can view information about your product subscriptions through the Customer Portal. Red Hat provides an organization-wide methods to track the software products and subscriptions deployed across an account.
Figure 1.1. Subscription Management Offerings
Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) allows administrators to know:
- Which products are available to your organization
- Which subscriptions and entitlements you have used
- Which products are installed on your systems
RHSM allows administrators to identify the relationship between their systems and the subscriptions used by those systems from two different perspectives:
- All active subscriptions for an account and which systems are consuming them
- All systems profiled within the inventory and which subscriptions they are consuming
RHSM can perform many of the tasks of the on-premise tools including:
- Registering systems
- Attaching and renewing subscriptions
- Retrieving system facts, contract information, and UUID
Figure 1.2. The Subscription Process
For large environments, highly-secure environments, and many other situations, a hosted arrangement is not feasible. Companies need a way to attach subscriptions and deliver software content locally. In that case, an organization entry with an on-premise subscription management application such as Red Hat Satellite is added to the inventory in RHSM. The list of attached subscriptions is defined in a manifest, which outlines all of the subscriptions, products, and content repositories for that organization.The subscription management application then directly manages all of the systems and units at its local site. This has performance benefits by lowering bandwidth, and it offers significant management benefits to administrators by allowing local and flexible control over subscription management.
Before you can register your systems with RHSM, you need an active subscription and available entitlements. Subscriptions can be purchased through the Red Hat Store or by contacting Sales directly. After purchasing, you may need to wait 10 minutes before the subscriptions show up in Customer Portal. After you successfully purchase the subscriptions you need to manage your Red Hat products and services, you register the subscriptions with RHSM. Finally, you attach individual subscriptions and entitlements to the systems that can use them.
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