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Chapter 4. New Features and Enhancements

This chapter introduces new features in Red Hat Satellite 6.4, and links to further information.

Ansible Enhancements
  • The Satellite installer now installs Ansible Core and required Foreman modules.
  • Remote execution of Ansible jobs is now handled by the Capsule Server.
  • Ansible integration in Satellite has been improved.
  • Red Hat Insights can now be deployed to hosts using Ansible, either when hosts are provisioned or later.
Support for Ansible in Satellite
  • Satellite 6.4 supports importing Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, which were introduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4.
  • Satellite 6.4 supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles to add Ansible roles to make configuration faster and easier.
  • Satellite 6.4 does not support any other roles or playbooks unless you also have a valid Ansible Engine subscription.
  • You can import custom Ansible roles from external locations such as Ansible Galaxy. However, these additional roles and playbooks are not supported through your Satellite or Smart Management subscription.
  • Ansible playbooks that you create, from a support perspective, are considered part of a scripting framework. Red Hat Support will assist in the usage and syntax of commands. For debugging or authoring of a playbook on behalf of a customer, Red Hat Consulting services might be engaged to meet this requirement. For more information, see How does Red Hat support scripting frameworks? and the Scope of Coverage section of Red Hat Ansible Engine Life Cycle.
Auditing Enhancements

Auditing of management events has been improved to include:

  • Changes to role-based access control configuration
  • Changes to the content management life cycle
  • Changes to Satellite’s taxonomy
  • User interactions
Discovery plug-in
You can now enable a Capsule Server to be a Template Capsule for a discovery subnet. Template Capsule provides a proxy service for provisioning templates for a discovery subnet.
Composite Content View Republishing
A Composite Content View is now republished when a component Content View is republished.
Custom Configuration Enhancements
Custom configuration values recommended by Red Hat are no longer overwritten by the Satellite installer.
Load Balancing
You can now set up a load-balanced Capsule pool to provide resilience against planned and unplanned outages.
Manifest and Subscription Management Enhancements
You can now edit your imported manifest and manage the subscription allocations directly in the Satellite web UI.
Puppet 5 Support
Red Hat Satellite 6.4 now uses Puppet 5.
Provisioning on AWS GovCloud
You can use Amazon Web Services GovCloud regions in host provisioning.
RHV 4 API Support
You can now use RHV 4 API to evaluate the new engine API. This item is provided as a technology preview feature.
RSS Feed Support
With the new RSS feed, you can access the Red Hat Satellite blog from the Satellite web UI. You can also enable or disable update notifications for the RSS feed.
Support for External Databases
You can now use a remote database that runs on a separate server to Satellite Server. You can either migrate an existing internal database to a server or create a database on another server. This helps improve performance in larger deployments.
Support for Private Docker Registries
You can now synchronize images from your custom repositories that you create in private registries on Docker Hub.
Support for Performance Co-Pilot
You can now access Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7’s Performance Co-Pilot(PCP) suite of tools for acquiring, storing, and analyzing system-level performance measurements.
User Interface Enhancements
Satellite introduces vertical navigation that is optimized for large screens, as well as improvements to navigation and search functionality for easier repository retrieval.
satellite-maintain alias added
The satellite-maintain alias has been added for the foreman-maintain command.