Chapter 1. Understanding Red Hat Subscription Management
Red Hat Subscription Manager tracks the Red Hat products that your organization has purchased and the systems that the products are installed on. Subscription Manager establishes the relationship between the product subscriptions that are available to the system and the elements of infrastrcuture of your business where those subscriptions are allocated.
Red Hat subscription services have moved from Red Hat Customer Portal to Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, however, your technical environment might require you to perform some tasks in the Customer Portal. For example, a user with a Red Hat Satellite Server on a disconnected network will continue to use the Customer Portal to create and manage subscription manifests. Also, a connected user without a Satellite Server will use the Customer Portal to enable simple content access for their organization.
If simple content access mode is enabled for your Red Hat organization, then you do not need to attach subscriptions or manage entitlements. The simple content access mode is enabled at the organization-level for new accounts by default. For information about enabling simple content access mode for an existing organization, see Enabling simple content access with 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
Red Hat Subscription Management provides administrators with the following information:
- Which products are available to your organization
- Which products are installed on your systems
- The status of your subscriptions
Red Hat Subscription Management 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
Additional resources
- For information about the changes and improvements to the subscription management platform, see Transition of Red Hat’s subscription services to console.redhat.com
- For more information about simple content access, see Getting Started with Simple Content Access.
- For information about how to register your RHEL system, see Getting Started with RHEL System Registration.
- For information about managing user roles for services hosted on the Hybrid Cloud Console, see User Access Configuration Guide for Role-based Access Control (RBAC).