Supported architectures and kickstart scenarios in Satellite 6

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Satellite 6

Issue

Red Hat Satellite 6 provides flexibility when it comes to provisioning, however Red Hat provides documentation and support for selected provisioning workflows. This article describes level of support for provisioning with Red Hat Satellite 6.

Resolution

The following table describes supported kickstart workflows from particular Satellite 6 version. Dash (-) characters mean that the workflow is either not available, not implemented or unsupported. TP stands for Technology Preview and the feature can be removed from any future version of the product. Bold means it is supported and tested, italic means it is supported. See remarks below for more information.

Kickstart scenarios are tested and supported over HTTP protocol. Other protocols like HTTPS or NFS are known to work, but untested, undocumented and provisioning templates have no options. This applies also on UEFI HTTPS boot scenarios, when only the bootloader is downloaded over HTTPS.

This article does not cover image-based provisioning for virtualization or cloud compute resources. These workflows are fully supported as long as Satellite provides options to set source image or snapshot and either cloud-init is installed on the image or Satellite has DHCP or DNS control to be able to execute finish script over SSH to customize the instance.

Satellite 6 is based on open-source project Foreman which is known to provision and manage many operating systems including CentOS, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, Solaris or FreeBSD. This is however undocumented and not supported by Red Hat support channels.

Satellite 6.8+ has been tested and is supported with vSphere 7.0 UC1

x86 x86_64 PPC64 ARM64 S390x RHEV libvirt VMWare ESX(i) Hyper-V
Netboot PXE (BIOS) 1 6.0+ 6.0+ - - - 6.0+ 6.0+ 6.0+ 6.0+
Netboot PXE (UEFI) 2 - 6.3+ - - - 6.3+ 6.3+ 6.3+ 6.3+
Netboot BOOTP 3 - - TP - - - - - -
HTTP Boot (UEFI) IPv4 4 - 6.7+ - - - 6.7+ 6.8+ 6.7+ 6.7+
HTTP Boot (UEFI) IPv6 4 - 6.8+ - - - 6.8+ 6.8+ 6.8+ 6.8+
Netboot iPXE (BIOS) 5 - - - - - - - - -
Netboot iPXE (UEFI) 6 - - - - - - - - -
Discovery PXE (BIOS) 7 6.0+ 6.0+ - - - 6.0+ 6.0+ 6.0+ 6.0+
Discovery PXE (UEFI) 8 - 6.3+ - - - 6.3+ 6.3+ 6.3+ 6.3+
Discovery kexec (BIOS) 9 TP TP - - - TP TP TP TP
Discovery kexec (UEFI) 10 - TP - - - TP TP TP TP
Bootdisk Generic/Subnet Disk (BIOS/EFI) - - - - - - - - -
Bootdisk Host Disk (BIOS/EFI) - - - - - - - - -
Bootdisk Full Host Disk (BIOS/EFI) 6.0+ 6.0+ - - - 6.0+ 6.0+ 6.0+ 6.0+
SecureBoot 11 - - - - - - - - -
VLAN 12 - - - - - - - - -
IPv6 13 - - - - - - - - -
Bond/Team 14 - - - - - - - - -
NPAR 15 - - - - - - - - -
SR-IOV 16 - - - - - - - - -

Remarks

For more information about supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions visit client systems page.

For more KB articles/solutions related to Red Hat Satellite 6.x Provisioning Issues, please refer to the Consolidated Troubleshooting Article for Red Hat Satellite 6.x Provisioning related Issues


  1. PXELinux network boot, supported RHEL node versions: 5, 6, 7 and 8. Hyper-V 1st gen VMs are no longer supported in RHEL8, 2nd gen VM (UEFI) must be used. ↩︎

  2. PXEGrub2 network boot, supported RHEL node versions: 5, 6, 7 and 8. ↩︎

  3. BOOTP network boot protocol currently unsupported, workaround using hook plug-ins is reported to work↩︎

  4. HTTP UEFI Boot feature is done via Grub2 and fully supported on IPv4 with or without managed DHCP. It is the only supported workflow for IPv6 provisioning networks with limitations: DHCP must be unmanaged. There are known issues on some hardware with grub2 from RHEL7, with Satellite 7.0 upgrade the Capsule to EL8 or download and extract grubx64.efi from CentOS 9 Stream as a workaround ↩︎ ↩︎

  5. Chainbooting iPXE from PXELinux only with limited hardware support, UEFI was reported to work however this is untested and unsupported. ↩︎

  6. Chainbooting iPXE from PXEGrub2 in UEFI or via HTTP UEFI Boot was reported to work however this is untested and unsupported. ↩︎

  7. Discovery PXE workflow, supported RHEL node versions: 7 and 8 both in BIOS mode. ↩︎

  8. Discovery PXE workflow, supported RHEL node versions: 7 and 8 both in UEFI mode. ↩︎

  9. Discovery PXE-less workflow only supported on KVM/RHV for RHEL nodes 7 and 8. Kexec is a technology preview in RHEL therefore PXE-less discovery workflows are all technology preview in Satellite 6. There are known issues with kernel drivers rendering Anaconda unusable after kexec is performed. ↩︎

  10. Ditto. ↩︎

  11. SecureBoot is untested and unsupported, however it is reported to work on most hardware via SecureBoot PXE loader option and shim.efi stub loader. Due to security hardening in minor RHEL 7 and 8 releases, shim is unable to load older kernels which leads to signature errors↩︎

  12. Tagged VLAN is not implemented yet for any workflow, including discovery. It's known to work, Satellite 6.8+ ships with VLAN-ready kickstart/PXE templates. ↩︎

  13. Provisioning NIC with IPv6 is not implemented, except UEFI HTTP Boot. ↩︎

  14. Bonding or Teaming provisioning NIC are known to work from Satellite 6.3 (RM#17856) but this is unsupported at this point. ↩︎

  15. NPAR provisioning NIC is untested and might fail, not supported at this point. ↩︎

  16. SR-IOV provisioning NIC is untested and might fail, not supported at this point. ↩︎

Root Cause

System or architecture is not supported by Satellite 6 for provisioning.

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