Overview of Red Hat Subscription Management

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Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) is the service which manages your Red Hat subscriptions and entitlements. You can access your content through RHSM using Red Hat Satellite, Subscription Asset Manager (SAM), and the award-winning Customer Portal.

RHSM replaces Red Hat Network (RHN) Hosted. Red Hat decommissioned RHN in July 2017. You can no longer access or utilize APIs through the RHN interface or update your system using RHN. If you have not migrated yet, migrate as soon as possible to continue receiving support for your systems.

Client Side

RHSM uses a client/server architecture and relies on the candlepin service for managing subscriptions. Red Hat hosts its instances of candlepin, so that they are always available. You can also deploy instances of candlepin through RHSM, Satellite 6, or SAM. Through this service, you can manage multiple systems and view all of the subscriptions attached to your account.

RHSM Features

RHSM leverages the full value of your Red Hat subscriptions, entitlements, and contracts, as well as integrates with Red Hat’s system management tools to enable flexibility in your subscription choices.

For a full list of features supported by RHSM, click here.

RHSM helps your organization achieve four primary goals:

  • Improving how subscriptions are applied
    • Maintains dual inventories of available subscriptions and registered Red Hat systems
    • System-to-subscription mapping makes it easier for you to apply appropriate subscriptions to systems
  • Lowering costs and streamlining procurement
  • Maintaining regulatory compliance by tracking subscription assignments and contract expiration
  • Simplifying IT audit-readiness by offering a central inventory of current subscriptions and systems

Through RHSM, you can:

  • Register systems using activation keys
  • View a summary of contracts and the systems and orders applied to those contracts
  • View subscription and entitlement information in one place in the user interface
  • View a summary of subscription utilization, making the renewal decision easier
  • View system compliance with RHSM on a system-by-system basis
  • Transfer subscriptions

Registration Process

RHSM uses secure certificates to improve customers’ ability to know what subscriptions they purchased, where and how those subscriptions are being used, refine how software is consumed, and improved portability of the subscription across deployments which are physical, virtual, and cloud-based.

During the installation of a Red Hat product, a product certificate is installed on the system. When that system registers to Red Hat Subscription Management, a system certificate is placed on the system, which enables you to:

  • Add product(s) to your system.
  • Attach subscription(s) to a system.
  • Receive updates

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