Chapter 1. Introduction to On-Premise Subscription Management

A subscription management application maintains a list of all subscriptions available to an organization and a list of all systems within that organization. More important, a subscription management application maps what subscriptions are attached to what systems.
IT hardware needs to be managed and clearly inventoried, and the software installed on those machines also needs to be managed and clearly inventoried. An inventory is simply a means to track what software is installed and where it is installed and how many copies are actively being used.
IT administrators face increasing pressure to have an accurate accounting of the software, not just from governmental regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley in the United States, but also to achieve critical industry certificataions, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) or SAS-70. Generally, this accounting of software assets is called software license management; with Red Hat's subscription model, this is subscription management.
Subscription management establishes the relationship between the product subscriptions that are available and the elements of the IT infrastructure where those subscriptions are allocated.
With Red Hat's commitment to free and open software, subscription management is focused on delivering tools that help IT administrators monitor their software/systems inventory for their own benefit. Subscription management does not enforce or restrict access to products.

1.1. Defining Subscription Asset Manager

The simplest model for assigning subscriptions and delivering content is for local systems to connect directly to Red Hat's hosted subscription and content network. However, for large environments, highly-secure environments, and many other situations, that hosted arrangement is not feasible.
For those infrastructures, it is possible to allocate a subset of the account subscriptions to an on-premise application. The on-premise application manages subscription and system inventories locally. This has performance benefits by lowering bandwidth, and it offers significant management benefits to administrators by allowing local and flexible control over subscription management.
Subscription Asset Manager is that on-premise subscription management application. It performs two backend management functions:
  • Allocate subscriptions as a subscription service
  • Work as a real-time proxy for Red Hat's content delivery network
As a subscription service, Subscription Asset Manager handles the system registration (verifying that the system is allowed to access the content). It also supplies the system with information on what products are available and handles a central list of subscriptions and remaining quantities for the entire account.
Subscription Asset Manager works as a proxy server for the local systems to connect to Red Hat's hosted content delivery network. Ultimately, Red Hat's hosted services are still responsible for delivering the content to the system when requested.
Hosted Content Delivery and On-Premise Subscription Services

Figure 1.1. Hosted Content Delivery and On-Premise Subscription Services

Administrators may want to exert some control locally over subscription services or content delivery or both. Because each component in the subscription management framework is an independent application, with independent client configuration, different sources can be used.
Using subscription management applications offers administrators control over configuration and the ability to improve performance based on network conditions or physical locations of machines.
All Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions automatically include some tools for managing the subscription configuration:
  • Red Hat Subscription Manager client tools to manage local systems
  • Customer Portal Subscription Management to manage systems globally through the Customer Portal
  • Subscription Asset Manager to manage systems locally