7.9. Additional Tasks
This section provides a short overview of selected Satellite capabilities that can be used for automating certain tasks or extending the core usage of Satellite:
- Importing existing hosts – if you have existing hosts that have not been managed by Satellite in the past, you can import those hosts to the Satellite Server. This procedure is usually a step in transitioning from Red Hat Satellite 5. For more information, see Transitioning from Red Hat Satellite 5 to Red Hat Satellite 6 for detailed documentation. A high level overview of the transition process is available in the Red Hat Knowledgebase solution Transitioning from Red Hat Satellite 5 to Satellite 6.
- Discovering bare metal hosts – the Satellite Discovery plug-in enables automatic bare-metal discovery of unknown hosts on the provisioning network. These new hosts register themselves to the Satellite Server and the Puppet Agent on the client uploads system facts collected by Facter, such as serial ID, network interface, memory, and disk information. After registration you can initialize provisioning of those discovered hosts. For details, see Creating Hosts from Discovered Hosts in the Provisioning Guide.
- Backup management – backup and disaster recovery instructions, see Backing Up Satellite Server and Capsule Server in Administering Red Hat Satellite. Using remote execution, you can also configure recurring backup tasks on managed hosts. For more information on remote execution see Configuring and Setting up Remote Jobs in Managing Hosts.
- Security management – Satellite supports security management in various ways, including update and errata management, OpenSCAP integration for system verification, update and security compliance reporting, and fine grained role based authentication. Find more information on errata management and OpenSCAP concepts in Managing Hosts.
- Incident management – Satellite supports the incident management process by providing a centralized overview of all systems including reporting and email notifications. Detailed information on each host is accessible from the Satellite Server, including the event history of recent changes. Satellite is also integrated with Red Hat Insights.
- Scripting with Hammer and API – Satellite provides a command line tool called Hammer that provides a CLI equivalent to the majority of web UI procedures. In addition, you can use the access to the Satellite API to write automation scripts in a selected programming language. For more information see the Hammer CLI Guide and API Guide.
