Chapter 1. Upgrading overview
Review prerequisites and available upgrade paths below before upgrading your current Red Hat Satellite installation to Red Hat Satellite 6.15.
For interactive upgrade instructions, you can also use the Red Hat Satellite Upgrade Helper on the Red Hat Customer Portal. This application provides you with an exact guide to match your current version number. You can find instructions that are specific to your upgrade path, as well as steps to prevent known issues. For more information, see Satellite Upgrade Helper on the Red Hat Customer Portal.
Note that you can upgrade Capsules separately from Satellite. For more information, see Section 1.3, “Upgrading Capsules separately from Satellite”.
1.1. Prerequisites
Upgrading to Satellite 6.15 affects your entire Satellite infrastructure. Before proceeding, complete the following:
- Read the Red Hat Satellite 6.15 Release Notes.
- Plan your upgrade path. For more information, see Section 1.2, “Upgrade paths”.
Plan for the required downtime. Satellite services are shut down during the upgrade. The upgrade process duration might vary depending on your hardware configuration, network speed, and the amount of data that is stored on the server.
Upgrading Satellite takes approximately 1 – 2 hours.
Upgrading Capsule takes approximately 10 – 30 minutes.
- Ensure that you have sufficient storage space on your server. For more information, see Preparing your Environment for Installation in Installing Satellite Server in a connected network environment and Preparing your Environment for Installation in Installing Capsule Server.
- Back up your Satellite Server and all Capsule Servers. For more information, see Backing Up Satellite Server and Capsule Server in Administering Red Hat Satellite.
- Plan for updating any scripts you use that contain Satellite API commands because some API commands differ between versions of Satellite.
Ensure that all Satellite Servers are on the same version.
If you customize configuration files, manually or using a tool such as Hiera, these changes are overwritten when the maintenance script runs during upgrading or updating. You can use the --noop option with the satellite-installer to test for changes. For more information, see the Red Hat Knowledgebase solution How to use the noop option to check for changes in Satellite config files during an upgrade.
1.2. Upgrade paths
You can upgrade to Red Hat Satellite 6.15 from Red Hat Satellite 6.14.
Satellite Servers and Capsule Servers on earlier versions must first be upgraded to Satellite 6.14. For more information, see Upgrading Red Hat Satellite to 6.14.
High-level upgrade steps
The high-level steps in upgrading Satellite to 6.15 are as follows:
- Upgrade Satellite Server to 6.15. For more information, see Section 2.1, “Satellite Server upgrade considerations”.
- Upgrade all Capsule Servers to 6.15. For more information, see Section 2.5, “Upgrading Capsule Servers”.
1.3. Upgrading Capsules separately from Satellite
You can upgrade Satellite to version 6.15 and keep Capsules at version 6.14 until you have the capacity to upgrade them too.
All the functionality that worked previously works on 6.14 Capsules. However, the functionality added in the 6.15 release will not work until you upgrade Capsules to 6.15.
Upgrading Capsules after upgrading Satellite can be useful in the following example scenarios:
- If you want to have several smaller outage windows instead of one larger window.
- If Capsules in your organization are managed by several teams and are located in different locations.
- If you use a load-balanced configuration, you can upgrade one load-balanced Capsule and keep other load-balanced Capsules at one version lower. This allows you to upgrade all Capsules one after another without any outage.
1.4. Following the progress of the upgrade
Because of the lengthy upgrade time, use a utility such as tmux to suspend and reattach a communication session. You can then check the upgrade progress without staying connected to the command shell continuously. For more information, see the tmux manual page.
If you lose connection to the command shell where the upgrade command is running you can see the logs in /var/log/foreman-installer/satellite.log to check if the process completed successfully.
