The Red Hat Network hosted environment is updated from using channel-based subscriptions to product-and-quantity based subscriptions. The new Certificate-Based RHN has redesigned client tools for managing subscriptions and systems and works with the new Subscription and Content Delivery Network (CDN).

The traditional channel-based RHN is still available as RHN Classic.

These two subscription services are available on the same platform, just with parallel technologies, so all subscriptions can be registered and managed either way.

Environments using a Satellite or proxy server will continue to use the traditional channel-based subscription system and will register systems with RHN Classic.

A new content server option, Red Hat Network Classic, has been added to the firstboot wizard. This uses the traditional channel-based RHN rather than the updated RHN and CDN. The default Red Hat Network option uses the new Certificate-based Red Hat Network management platform.

Certificate-Based RHN and RHN Classic are interoperable; if a system is registered using one service, the other service recognizes it and will not issue any warnings. However, these services do not work simultaneously. A system must be registered with one, and only one, subscription service; it cannot be registered with both.

There is currently no direct migration path from a system using RHN Classic to the new Certificate-based Red Hat Network. To move a system from one service to the other, there are two options:

A new set of client tools, the Red Hat Subscription Manager GUI and CLI, are provided with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 to manage subscriptions through Certificate-Based RHN. The existing rhn_* tools are still available to handle systems managed through RHN Classic.