Chapter 2. Planning Satellite Server installation

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (x86_64)

• Install Satellite Server on a freshly provisioned system that serves no other function except to run Satellite Server. Do not use an existing system because the Satellite installer will affect the configuration of several components.
• Ensure you have administrative user (root) access to the system.

• Ensure the system meets the following requirements:

  • 4 CPU cores
  • 20 GB RAM or higher
  • 4 GB RAM of swap space or higher
  • A unique host name, which can contain lower-case letters, numbers, dots (.) and hyphens (-)
• If you use custom certificates, ensure that the Common Name (CN) of the custom certificate is a fully qualified domain name (FQDN). Satellite Server and Capsule Server do not support shortnames in the hostnames.
• Ensure SELinux is enabled, either in enforcing or permissive mode. Installation with disabled SELinux is not supported. For more information, see Security considerations in Overview, concepts, and deployment considerations.
• Ensure the system clock on the system is synchronized across the network. If the system clock is not synchronized, SSL certificate verification might fail. For example, you can use the Chrony suite for timekeeping. For more information, see Configuring time synchronization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Configuring basic system settings
• If you are installing in an environment with air-gapped Satellite Servers, ensure that all your Satellite Servers are on the same Satellite version for ISS Export Sync to work. ISS Network Sync works across all Satellite versions that support it. For more information, see Synchronizing Content Between Satellite Servers in Managing content.
• Ensure the system uses the UTF-8 encoding. If your territory is USA and your language is English, set en_US.utf-8 as the system-wide locale settings. For more information about configuring system locale in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, see Configuring the system locale in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Configuring basic system settings.

• If you use an external identity provider in your deployment, ensure the provider did not create the following user accounts on the system. These user accounts can cause conflicts with the local users that Satellite Server creates:

  • apache
  • foreman
  • foreman-proxy
  • postgres
  • pulp
  • puppet
  • redis
  • tomcat

• Ensure that the directories used by Satellite Server have sufficient disk space available:

  Expand

  Table 2.1. Storage requirements for a Satellite Server installation

  Directory	Installation Size	Runtime Size
  /var/log	10 MB	10 GB
  /var/lib/pgsql	1 GB	20 GB
  /usr	10 GB	Not Applicable
  /opt/puppetlabs	500 MB	Not Applicable
  /var/lib/pulp	1 MB	300 GB
  /var/lib/containers if using Red Hat Lightspeed in Satellite	20 GB	30 GB

  Show more

  These values are based on expected use case scenarios and can vary according to individual environments. The runtime size was measured with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, and 9 repositories synchronized.

• If you mount the /tmp directory as a separate file system, use the exec mount option in the /etc/fstab file.

  If /tmp is already mounted with the noexec option, change the option to exec and remount the file system. This is a requirement for the puppetserver service to work.

• If you mount the /var/lib/pulp directory as an NFS share, specify the SELinux context of the /var/lib/pulp directory in the file system table. Add the following lines to /etc/fstab:

  nfs.example.com:/nfsshare  /var/lib/pulp  nfs  context="system_u:object_r:pulpcore_var_lib_t:s0"  1 2

  If the NFS share is already mounted, remount it using the above configuration and restore the SELinux context:

  # restorecon -R /var/lib/pulp

• Do not use symbolic links for /var/lib/pulp/.

Additional resources

• Disk partitions in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Managing storage devices

• The exact amount of storage you require for log messages depends on your installation and setup. You can manage the size of the log files by using logrotate.
• Consider mounting /var on LVM storage. This can help the system to scale because most Satellite Server data is stored in the /var directory.
• Use high-bandwidth, low-latency storage for the /var/lib/pulp/ and /var/lib/pgsql directories. Using high latency, low-bandwidth storage causes performance degradation because Red Hat Satellite has many operations that are I/O intensive.
• Use a file system with low input-output latency. Do not use the GFS2 file system because the input-output latency is too high.

Additional resources

• How to use logrotate utility to rotate log files
• Logging and reporting problems in Administering Red Hat Satellite

• Ensure an IPv6 loopback is configured on the base system. The loopback is typically configured by default. Do not disable it. Using the ipv6.disable=1 kernel parameter or the net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1 sysctl option will break the installation.

• Deploy an external HTTP proxy server that supports both IPv4 and IPv6. This is required because Red Hat Content Delivery Network distributes content only over IPv4 networks, therefore you must use this HTTP proxy to pull content into the Satellite on your IPv6 network. You must configure Satellite to use this dual-stack (supporting both IPv4 and IPv6) HTTP proxy as the default HTTP proxy.
• Satellite does not support configuring an HTTP proxy using a direct IPv6 address. Instead, configure the HTTP proxy with a FQDN that resolves to the IPv6 address.

• Deploy an external DHCPv6 server and configure it manually to communicate with the network boot process and to manage IP address assignment because Satellite cannot integrate with a DHCPv6 server and manage its configuration. For more information about DHCPv6 server configuration, see Options in unmanaged DHCPv6 in Provisioning hosts.
• Configure Satellite for UEFI HTTP boot provisioning. Although Satellite provisioning templates include IPv6 support for PXE and HTTP (iPXE) provisioning, the UEFI HTTP Boot provisioning is the only tested and certified provisioning workflow. For more information, see Section 6.5, “Configuring Satellite for UEFI HTTP boot provisioning in an IPv6 network”.

Additional resources

• How do I disable the IPv6 protocol on Red Hat Satellite and/or Red Hat Capsule server? in Red Hat Knowledgebase
• Section 6.6.1, “Adding a default HTTP proxy by using Satellite web UI”

Additional resources

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Documentation
• What is AWS Direct Connect?