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Chapter 1. Upgrading overview

Review the following prerequisites and available upgrade paths before upgrading your current Red Hat Satellite installation to Red Hat Satellite 6.16.

For interactive instructions for performing the upgrade, you can use the Red Hat Satellite Upgrade Helper on the Red Hat Customer Portal. This application provides upgrade instructions customized for your current version number of Satellite. As a result, you receive 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.

Additional resources

1.1. Upgrade paths
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You can upgrade to Red Hat Satellite 6.16 from Red Hat Satellite 6.15. For complete instructions on how to upgrade, see Chapter 2, Upgrading Red Hat Satellite.

The high-level steps in upgrading Satellite to 6.16 are as follows:

  1. Ensure that your Satellite Servers and Capsule Servers have been upgraded to Satellite 6.15. For more information, see Upgrading connected Red Hat Satellite to 6.15 or Upgrading disconnected Red Hat Satellite to 6.15.
  2. If you use an external database, upgrade the external database to PostgreSQL 13. Optionally, upgrade the underlying operating system from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

  3. Upgrade your Satellite Server:

    1. Upgrade your Satellite Server to 6.16.

    2. Optional: Upgrade the operating system on your Satellite Server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

      Note

      Although upgrading the operating system of your Satellite Server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is optional, you will need to do it before you can upgrade to the next Satellite version after 6.16.

    3. Synchronize the new 6.16 repositories.

  4. Upgrade your Capsule Servers:

    1. Upgrade all Capsule Servers to 6.16.

    2. Optional: Upgrade the operating system on your Capsule Servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

      Note

      Although upgrading the operating system of your Capsule Servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is optional, you will need to do it before you can upgrade to the next Satellite version after 6.16.

Capsules at version 6.15 will keep working with your upgraded Satellite Server 6.16. After you upgrade Satellite Server to 6.16, you can upgrade your Capsules separately over multiple maintenance windows. For more information, see Section 1.3, “Upgrading Capsules separately from Satellite”.

Satellite services are shut down during the upgrade. Ensure to plan for the required downtime. 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 Server takes approximately 1 – 2 hours.
  • Upgrading Capsule Server takes approximately 10 – 30 minutes.

Hammer and API considerations

If you have any scripts that use the Hammer CLI tool, ensure that you modify these scripts according to the changes in Hammer. If you have any integrations that use the Satellite REST API, ensure that you modify these integrations according to the changes in the API. For more information about changes in Hammer and API, see Release notes.

1.2. Prerequisites
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Upgrading to Satellite 6.16 affects your entire Satellite infrastructure. Before proceeding, complete the following:

  • Read the Red Hat Satellite 6.16 Release Notes.
  • 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.
  • Ensure that you have at least the same amount of free space on /var/lib/pgsql as that consumed by /var/lib/pgsql/data. Upgrading to Satellite 6.16 involves a PostgreSQL 12 to PostgreSQL 13 upgrade. The contents of /var/lib/pgsql/data are backed up during the PostgreSQL upgrade.
  • 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.
  • Migrate all organizations to Simple Content Access (SCA). For more information, see the Red Hat Knowledgebase solution Simple Content Access.
  • Update certificates that use sha1 checksum to a newer hashing algorithm.

Ensure that all Satellite Servers are on the same version.

Warning

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.

1.3. Upgrading Capsules separately from Satellite
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You can upgrade Satellite to version 6.16 and keep Capsules at version 6.15 until you have the capacity to upgrade them too.

All the functionality that worked previously works on 6.15 Capsules. However, the functionality added in the 6.16 release will not work until you upgrade Capsules to 6.16.

Upgrading Capsules after upgrading Satellite can be useful in the following example scenarios:

  1. If you want to have several smaller outage windows instead of one larger window.
  2. If Capsules in your organization are managed by several teams and are located in different locations.
  3. 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
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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.

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