Enabling metering for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Extended Lifecycle Support in your cloud environment

Updated -

Introduction

This article applies to the following cloud marketplace providers:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Microsoft Azure

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Extended Life-cycle Support (RHEL 7 ELS) delivers certain Red Hat defined Critical and Important security fixes and selected urgent priority bug fixes and troubleshooting for the last minor release. This article provides general instructions for enabling access to RHEL 7 ELS in the aforementioned cloud marketplaces.

The following options are available to track usage:

  • Host-metering agent
  • Red Hat Insights Cost Management.

Please refer to Enabling metering for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Extended Lifecycle Support in your cloud environment to select the optimal option for your environment.

Configure usage with host-metering agent

Getting Started

You will need the following privileges in your cloud environment. Note that you may require multiple user accounts to complete these tasks.

  • Permission to make purchases on Hyperscaler marketplace
  • Permission to see account information and make changes to the account in Hyperscaler console

This process requires valid credentials to the Red Hat Customer Portal. You may create an account using the following link:

How to Create a New Red Hat Login ID and Account

The following permissions are necessary to proceed:

  • Create specific user accounts within the Red Hat Customer Portal
  • Access Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console access
  • Administrator privilege on RHEL instances
  • Submit tickets with Red Hat

If you need to join an existing account, please contact your account Organization Administrator.

Step 1: Enable metering

NOTE: Metering services are only supported on RHEL 7. Currently, upgrading to RHEL 8 or RHEL 9 for metering services is not supported.

This step covers the following tasks at a high level:

  • Acquire an appropriate cloud marketplace subscription. Currently available options are "Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration with ELS" and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS)"
  • Establish a RHEL 7 fleet by converting third party Linux systems with LEAPP (if necessary).
  • Add the Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) add-on to your Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts on the appropriate cloud instances.
  • Configure metered billing for your RHEL 7 cloud instances.

We recommend that users start with RHEL 7.9 based instances.

Step 1.1: Install required packages

Install subscription-manager and host-metering packages
NOTE: The rpm version of subscription-manager >= 1.24.53-1 is required for host-metering. Though the dependency updates with the package, a manual check is currently required.

$ sudo yum -y update subscription-manager 
$ sudo yum -y install host-metering

Also, ensure that rhsmcertd service is enabled. If it is disabled, it must be enabled and started.

$ sudo systemctl status rhsmcertd.service
$ sudo systemctl enable --now rhsmcertd.service

Step 1.2: Refresh your subscription

After downloading the certificate, refresh your entitlements from the server to include the add-ons:

$ sudo subscription-manager refresh

Step 1.3: Ensure connectivity for host-metering

The host-metering agent communicates with https://cert.console.redhat.com/api/rhel-telemetry/. Ensure that your network's firewall is configured to allow connections on port 443 to this host and path.
For proxy services, host-metering makes use of Golang's ability to interpret the HTTP environment variable, which contains proxy settings. Make sure that you have configured your environment to match your proxy server's settings. For more in-depth guidance, please visit How to configure HTTP/HTTPS proxy for host-metering service ?.

Step 1.4: Start the host-metering service

Enable and start the host-metering service:

$ sudo systemctl enable --now host-metering.service

If the service was already running, restart the service so it picks up the certificate change:

$ sudo systemctl restart host-metering.service

Note: If you purchased the RHEL for third party migrations offering but want a subset of your systems to utilize an existing 1 year or 3 year subscription, make sure that host-metering is not running on those systems.

$ sudo systemctl stop --now host-metering.service 
$ sudo systemctl disable host-metering.service

Establishing Success

The following tips will be helpful in determining successful configuration of metering in your environment:

  • Check system logs. host-metering logs by default to stderr, and thus will be logged in the system journal. Also, from verify Proxy settings (if applicable) as described in How to configure HTTP/HTTPS proxy for host-metering service ?.
  • Review billing reports from your cloud provider. On an hourly basis, Red Hat's subscriptions service at the hybrid cloud console calculates and sends RHEL 7 ELS remittance to cloud marketplaces. Consult your cloud's cost and usage services to understand when this remittance will be visible to you.
  • Review usage on the Red Hat hybrid cloud console. On a daily basis, Red Hat's subscription service at the hybrid cloud console sums all remittance sent for RHEL 7 ELS usage and displays it at the RHEL Usage endpoint. You can view this (after up to 24 hours) by applying the filter "RHEL for x86 ELS On-Demand" and observing your total usage on the chart, as well as RHEL 7 ELS instances active during the current calendar month in the "Current Monthly Instances" inventory table.

Step 2: Register the system

To register the system, use subscription-manager as per the directions in the Getting Started with RHEL Registration Guide. We also strongly recommend that insights-client be installed.

To simplify registration further, learn how to Create, Configure, and use Activation Keys

Step 3: Tell subscription manager to use CDN-delivered content

Configure subscription-manager to use CDN-delivered content in addition to the internal Red Hat Update Infrastructure (RHUI) repositories available within the cloud platform.

# subscription-manager config --rhsm.manage_repos=1

Step 4: Enable the ELS repositories

Enable the applicable ELS Repository to allow the end system to access available content:

# subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-els-rpms

Configure usage with cost management

Red Hat Insights Cost Management uses instance size and lifespan information from the cloud provider, and is the right choice for customers who do not want a metering process running on the system, sharing OS-level data. This method does require tagging of RHEL 7 ELS instances (described below), to enable remittance for the ELS add-on. This option is an alternative to the host-metering agent and cost management options provided by Amazon and Microsoft Azure cloud providers. Please select the one that best suits your environment.

How to meter when you have chosen Insights Cost Management

The following sections will help you enable cost metering through Insights Cost Management on supported cloud providers.

AWS

Set up a reporting source

Though AWS tracks your costs, Red Hat needs to access a reporting source for the cost-efficient billing of your new Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. You need to export these reports and store them for automated access. For this process, you need to set up an S3 bucket as a source for these reports. For details, see cost management documentation.

Tag your systems

To classify systems, such as, which of them are RHEL instances and which addons they consume, you need to tag them by using AWS cost allocation tags. Cost management service identifies such systems and tracks them in the report. Some tags are essential to identify systems as RHEL instances, while others are optional, like add-on subscriptions that you have elected to add to your systems. To add tags to your systems, see Configuring tags on your integrations. To find a list of available tags, see Adding tags to an AWS resource.

Enabling metering service on your AWS Integration

You need to enable metering in your AWS integration on the Hybrid Cloud Console. For detailed steps, see Adding RHEL metering to an integration.

Microsoft Azure

Set up a reporting source

Though Azure tracks your costs, Red Hat needs access to a reporting source for the cost-efficient billing of your new Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. You need to export these reports and store them for automated access. For this process, you need to set up an Azure blob storage bucket as a source for these reports. For details, see cost management documentation.

Tag your systems

To classify systems, such as, which of them are RHEL instances and which addons they consume, you need to tag them by using Azure cost allocation tags. Cost management service identifies such systems and tracks them in the report. Some tags are essential to identify systems as RHEL instances, while others are optional, like add-on subscriptions that you have elected to add to your systems. To add tags to your systems, see Configuring tags on your integrations. To find a list of available tags, see Adding tags to an Azure resource.

Enabling metering service on your Azure Integration

You need to enable metering in your Azure integration on the Hybrid Cloud Console. For detailed steps, see Adding RHEL metering to an integration.

Additional Information:

Please see the following for further details regarding ELS:

Getting further assistance

Please reach out to Red Hat Support for assistance if any issues are encountered during this process.

Converting from a Third Party system to RHEL 7

These instructions assume you are starting with a RHEL 7 instance, but Red Hat can also help with your Alma Linux, CentOS Linux, Oracle Linux, or Rocky Linux systems that you may want to continue to maintain by converting them to RHEL 7 while you plan an upgrade to a later release of RHEL.

The steps are similar to those found here, but since this article assumes a RHEL 7.9 system as a prerequisite, additional work must be done on a third-party machine to convert it to RHEL. If this sounds scary, don’t worry! We have a tool called Convert2RHEL to assist with the process. For this type of conversion, please follow the instructions here.

References:

Comments