Chapter 8. Deployment considerations
This section provides an overview of general topics to be considered when planning a Red Hat Satellite deployment together with recommendations and references to more specific documentation.
8.1. Satellite Server configuration
The first step to a working Satellite infrastructure is installing an instance of Satellite Server on a dedicated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 server.
For more information about installing Satellite Server in a connected network, see Installing Satellite Server in a connected network environment.
On large Satellite deployments, you can improve performance by configuring your Satellite with predefined tuning profiles. For more information, see Tuning Satellite Server with Predefined Profiles in Installing Satellite Server in a connected network environment.
For more information about installing Satellite Server in a disconnected network, see Installing Satellite Server in a disconnected network environment.
On large Satellite deployments, you can improve performance by configuring your Satellite with predefined tuning profiles. For more information, see Tuning Satellite Server with Predefined Profiles in Installing Satellite Server in a disconnected network environment.
Adding Red Hat subscription manifests to Satellite Server
A Red Hat Subscription Manifest is a set of encrypted files that contains your subscription information. Satellite Server uses this information to access the CDN and find what repositories are available for the associated subscription. For instructions on how to create and import a Red Hat Subscription Manifest see Managing Red Hat Subscriptions in Managing content.
Red Hat Satellite requires a single manifest for each organization configured on the Satellite. If you plan to use the Organization feature of Satellite to manage separate units of your infrastructure under one Red Hat Network account, then assign subscriptions from the one account to per-organization manifests as required.
If you plan to have more than one Red Hat Network account, or if you want to manage systems belonging to another entity that is also a Red Hat Network account holder, then you and the other account holder can assign subscriptions, as required, to manifests. A customer that does not have a Satellite subscription can create a Subscription Asset Manager manifest, which can be used with Satellite, if they have other valid subscriptions. You can then use the multiple manifests in one Satellite Server to manage multiple organizations.
If you must manage systems but do not have access to the subscriptions for the RPMs, you must use Red Hat Enterprise Linux Satellite Add-On. For more information, see Satellite Add-On.
The following diagram shows two Red Hat Network account holders, who want their systems to be managed by the same Satellite installation. In this scenario, Example Corporation 1 can allocate any subset of their 60 subscriptions, in this example they have allocated 30, to a manifest. This can be imported into the Satellite as a distinct Organization. This allows system administrators the ability to manage Example Corporation 1’s systems using Satellite completely independently of Example Corporation 2’s organizations (R&D, Operations, and Engineering).
Figure 8.1. Satellite Server with multiple manifests
When creating a Red Hat Subscription Manifest:
- Add the subscription for Satellite Server to the manifest if planning a disconnected or self-registered Satellite Server. This is not necessary for a connected Satellite Server that is subscribed using the Subscription Manager utility on the base system.
- Add subscriptions for all Capsule Servers you want to create.
- Add subscriptions for all Red Hat Products you want to manage with Satellite.
- Note the date when the subscriptions are due to expire and plan for their renewal before the expiry date.
- Create one manifest per organization. You can use multiple manifests and they can be from different Red Hat subscriptions.
Red Hat Satellite allows the use of future-dated subscriptions in the manifest. This enables uninterrupted access to repositories when future-dated subscriptions are added to a manifest before the expiry date of existing subscriptions.
Note that the Red Hat Subscription Manifest can be modified and reloaded to Satellite Server in case of any changes in your infrastructure, or when adding more subscriptions. Manifests should not be deleted. If you delete the manifest from the Red Hat Customer Portal or in the Satellite web UI it will unregister all of your content hosts.
8.2. Satellite Server with external database
When you install Satellite, the satellite-installer command creates databases on the same server that you install Satellite. Depending on your requirements, moving to external databases can provide increased working memory for Satellite, which can improve response times for database operating requests. Moving to external databases distributes the workload and can increase the capacity for performance tuning.
Consider using external databases if you plan to use your Satellite deployment for the following scenarios:
- Frequent remote execution tasks. This creates a high volume of records in PostgreSQL and generates heavy database workloads.
- High disk I/O workloads from frequent repository synchronization or Content View publishing. This causes Satellite to create a record in PostgreSQL for each job.
- High volume of hosts.
- High volume of synced content.
For more information about using an external database, see Using External Databases with Satellite in Installing Satellite Server in a connected network environment.
8.3. Locations and topology
This section outlines general considerations that should help you to specify your Satellite deployment scenario. The most common deployment scenarios are listed in Chapter 7, Common deployment scenarios. The defining questions are:
- How many Capsule Servers do I need? – The number of geographic locations where your organization operates should translate to the number of Capsule Servers. By assigning a Capsule to each location, you decrease the load on Satellite Server, increase redundancy, and reduce bandwidth usage. Satellite Server itself can act as a Capsule (it contains an integrated Capsule by default). This can be used in single location deployments and to provision the base system’s of Capsule Servers. Using the integrated Capsule to communicate with hosts in remote locations is not recommended as it can lead to suboptimal network utilization.
- What services will be provided by Capsule Servers? – After establishing the number of Capsules, decide what services will be enabled on each Capsule. Even though the whole stack of content and configuration management capabilities is available, some infrastructure services (DNS, DHCP, TFTP) can be outside of a Satellite administrator’s control. In such case, Capsules have to integrate with those external services (see Section 7.5, “Capsule with external services”).
- Is my Satellite Server required to be disconnected from the Internet? – Disconnected Satellite is a common deployment scenario (see Section 7.4, “Disconnected Satellite”). If you require frequent updates of Red Hat content on a disconnected Satellite, plan an additional Satellite instance for Inter-Satellite Synchronization.
- What compute resources do I need for my hosts? – Apart from provisioning bare-metal hosts, you can use various compute resources supported by Satellite. To learn about provisioning on different compute resources see Provisioning hosts.
8.4. Content sources
The Red Hat Subscription Manifest determines what Red Hat repositories are accessible from your Satellite Server. Once you enable a Red Hat repository, an associated Satellite Product is created automatically. For distributing content from custom sources you need to create products and repositories manually. Red Hat repositories are signed with GPG keys by default, and it is recommended to create GPG keys also for your custom repositories.
Yum repositories that contain only RPM packages support the On demand download policy, which reduces synchronization time and storage space. The On demand download policy saves space and time by only downloading packages when requested by hosts. For detailed instructions on setting up content sources, see Importing Content in Managing content.
A custom repository within Satellite Server is in most cases populated with content from an external staging server. Such servers lie outside of the Satellite infrastructure, however, it is recommended to use a revision control system (such as Git) on these servers to have better control over the custom content.
8.5. Content lifecycle
Satellite provides features for precise management of the content lifecycle. A lifecycle environment represents a stage in the content lifecycle, a Content View is a filtered set of content, and can be considered as a defined subset of content. By associating Content Views with lifecycle environments, you make content available to hosts in a defined way.
For a detailed overview of the content management process see Importing Custom Content in Managing content. The following section provides general scenarios for deploying content views as well as lifecycle environments.
The default lifecycle environment called Library gathers content from all connected sources. It is not recommended to associate hosts directly with the Library as it prevents any testing of content before making it available to hosts. Instead, create a lifecycle environment path that suits your content workflow. The following scenarios are common:
A single lifecycle environment – content from Library is promoted directly to the production stage. This approach limits the complexity but still allows for testing the content within the Library before making it available to hosts.
A single lifecycle environment path – both operating system and applications content is promoted through the same path. The path can consist of several stages (for example Development, QA, Production), which enables thorough testing but requires additional effort.
Application specific lifecycle environment paths – each application has a separate path, which allows for individual application release cycles. You can associate specific compute resources with application lifecycle stages to facilitate testing. On the other hand, this scenario increases the maintenance complexity.
The following content view scenarios are common:
- All in one content view – a content view that contains all necessary content for the majority of your hosts. Reducing the number of content views is an advantage in deployments with constrained resources (time, storage space) or with uniform host types. However, this scenario limits the content view capabilities such as time based snapshots or intelligent filtering. Any change in content sources affects a proportion of hosts.
- Host specific content view – a dedicated content view for each host type. This approach can be useful in deployments with a small number of host types (up to 30). However, it prevents sharing content across host types as well as separation based on criteria other than the host type (for example between operating system and applications). With critical updates every content view has to be updated, which increases maintenance efforts.
- Host specific composite content view – a dedicated combination of content views for each host type. This approach enables separating host specific and shared content, for example you can have dedicated content views for the operating system and application content. By using a composite, you can manage your operating system and applications separately and at different frequencies.
- Component based content view – a dedicated content view for a specific application. For example a database content view can be included into several composite content views. This approach allows for greater standardization but it leads to an increased number of content views.
The optimal solution depends on the nature of your host environment. Avoid creating a large number of content views, but keep in mind that the size of a content view affects the speed of related operations (publishing, promoting). Also make sure that when creating a subset of packages for the content view, all dependencies are included as well. Note that kickstart repositories should not be added to content views, as they are used for host provisioning only.
8.6. Content deployment
Content deployment manages errata and packages on content hosts. Satellite can be configured to perform remote execution over MQTT/HTTPS (pull-based) or SSH (push-based). While remote execution is enabled on Satellite Server by default, it is disabled on Capsule Servers and content hosts. You must enable it manually.
8.7. Provisioning
Satellite provides several features to help you automate the host provisioning, including provisioning templates, configuration management with Puppet, and host groups for standardized provisioning of host roles. For a description of the provisioning workflow see Provisioning Workflow in Provisioning hosts. The same guide contains instructions for provisioning on various compute resources.
8.8. Role based authentication
Assigning a role to a user enables controlling access to Satellite components based on a set of permissions. You can think of role based authentication as a way of hiding unnecessary objects from users who are not supposed to interact with them.
There are various criteria for distinguishing among different roles within an organization. Apart from the administrator role, the following types are common:
- Roles related to applications or parts of infrastructure – for example, roles for owners of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system versus owners of application servers and database servers.
- Roles related to a particular stage of the software lifecycle – for example, roles divided among the development, testing, and production phases, where each phase has one or more owners.
- Roles related to specific tasks – such as security manager or license manager.
When defining a custom role, consider the following recommendations:
- Define the expected tasks and responsibilities – define the subset of the Satellite infrastructure that will be accessible to the role as well as actions permitted on this subset. Think of the responsibilities of the role and how it would differ from other roles.
- Use predefined roles whenever possible – Satellite provides a number of sample roles that can be used alone or as part of a role combination. Copying and editing an existing role can be a good start for creating a custom role.
- Consider all affected entities – for example, a content view promotion automatically creates new Puppet Environments for the particular lifecycle environment and content view combination. Therefore, if a role is expected to promote content views, it also needs permissions to create and edit Puppet Environments.
- Consider areas of interest – even though a role has a limited area of responsibility, there might be a wider area of interest. Therefore, you can grant the role a read only access to parts of Satellite infrastructure that influence its area of responsibility. This allows users to get earlier access to information about potential upcoming changes.
- Add permissions step by step – test your custom role to make sure it works as intended. A good approach in case of problems is to start with a limited set of permissions, add permissions step by step, and test continuously.
For instructions on defining roles and assigning them to users, see Managing Users and Roles in Administering Red Hat Satellite. The same guide contains information on configuring external authentication sources.
8.9. Additional tasks
This section provides a short overview of selected Satellite capabilities that can be used for automating certain tasks or extending the core usage of Satellite:
- Discovering bare-metal hosts – the Satellite Discovery plugin enables automatic bare-metal discovery of unknown hosts on the provisioning network. These new hosts register themselves to Satellite Server and the Puppet Agent on the client uploads system facts collected by Facter, such as serial ID, network interface, memory, and disk information. After registration you can initialize provisioning of those discovered hosts. For more information, see Creating Hosts from Discovered Hosts in Provisioning hosts.
- Backup management – backup and disaster recovery instructions, see Backing Up Satellite Server and Capsule Server in Administering Red Hat Satellite. Using remote execution, you can also configure recurring backup tasks on hosts. For more information on remote execution see Configuring and Setting up Remote Jobs in Managing hosts.
- Security management – Satellite supports security management in various ways, including update and errata management, OpenSCAP integration for system verification, update and security compliance reporting, and fine grained role based authentication. Find more information on errata management and OpenSCAP concepts in Managing hosts.
- Incident management – Satellite supports the incident management process by providing a centralized overview of all systems including reporting and email notifications. Detailed information on each host is accessible from Satellite Server, including the event history of recent changes. Satellite is also integrated with Red Hat Insights.
- Scripting with Hammer and API – Satellite provides a command line tool called Hammer that provides a CLI equivalent to the majority of web UI procedures. In addition, you can use the access to the Satellite API to write automation scripts in a selected programming language. For more information, see Hammer CLI guide and API guide.
