Chapter 1. Introduction

Content management in the context of Red Hat Satellite 6 means a work flow that provides a sustainable repository for multiple content types. For Red Hat content, Red Hat Satellite 6 also uses subscription information so that it knows what content is available to a user. This means Red Hat Satellite 6 uses components to manage the following:

The application life cycle is a concept central to Red Hat Satellite 6’s content management functions. The application life cycle defines how a particular system and its software look at a particular stage. For example, an application life cycle might be simple; you might only have a development stage and production stage. In this case the application life cycle might look like this:

However, a more complex application life cycle might have further stages, such as a phase for testing or a beta release. This adds extra stages to the application life cycle:

Ultimately, the stages in an application life cycle depend on your organization and its software development methods. However, Red Hat Satellite 6 provides methods to customize each application life cycle stage so that it suits your specifications.

Each stage in the application life cycle is called an environment in Red Hat Satellite 6. Each environment uses a specific collection of content. Red Hat Satellite 6 defines these content collections as a Content View. Each Content View acts as a filter where we can define what repositories, packages, and Puppet modules to include in a particular environment. This provides a method for you to define specific sets of content to designate to each environment.

The concept of the application life cycle depends on a certain level of progression. For example, environments in the early stages of an application life cycle might use newer and pre-release packages for development and testing of new features. Likewise, environments in the later stages might use only stable packages to suit production-level software. If the packages in development pass testing, you can promote the development Content View across the application life cycle so that it becomes the Content View for the production environment. This ensures that your application life cycle progresses with the development of your application.

Figure 1.1. The Red Hat Satellite 6 Application Life Cycle

Red Hat Satellite 6 manages different content types. This includes:

This guide uses an example scenario to demonstrate Red Hat Satellite 6’s features. In this scenario, a software development company called ACME recently installed Red Hat Satellite 6 and its system administrators want to start importing and managing Red Hat content. The end goal for ACME is to:

This guide only focuses on content management. Further features, such as host provisioning, environment architecture, and Satellite Server management, are covered in other guides in the Red Hat Satellite 6 series.

This guide provides both steps for using either the Red Hat Satellite 6 Web UI or its CLI tool (hammer). Use either depending on your preferred method of interacting with Red Hat Satellite 6. If using the CLI and do not want to include authentication details each time you enter a hammer command, create a CLI configuration file for the local user:

# mkdir ~/.hammer
# cat > .hammer/cli_config.yml <<EOF
:foreman:
    :host: 'https://satellite.example.com/'
    :username: 'admin'
    :password: 'p@55w0rd!'

EOF

Some CLI commands can use the --async option to perform certain tasks asynchronously. For example, you can synchronize content and publish Content Views as a asynchronous task rather than monitoring it. This guide omits the --async so that users can monitor progress of tasks to completion. If including the --async option for certain tasks, ensure the task completes before moving on to the next task.

Red Hat Satellite 6 hosts repositories for RPM and Puppet content, including content synchronized with Red Hat’s Content Delivery Network and your own custom repositories. Such repositories grow in size over time. This means you must estimate adequate size requirements to suit your environment and scale future requirements accordingly.

Red Hat Satellite 6 stores and manages repository content in /var/lib/pulp. It is recommended to mount this directory onto a large local partition that you can scale. For example, use Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to create this partition.

Red Hat Satellite 6 synchronize and stores packages from Red Hat’s Content Delivery Network. This includes repositories for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Red Hat software. The recommended storage requirements for Red Hat content are as follows:

During Production Phase 1 of a major Red Hat Enterprise Linux version:

After Production Phase 1 of a major Red Hat Enterprise Linux version:

For more information about Red Hat Production Phases, see "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle".

Red Hat Satellite 6 provides users with the ability to create Content Views. Content Views act as a snapshot of a user-defined content collection at a particular point in time. This provides a means to create customized content collections from preexisting repositories.

Each unit of content in a Content View uses a symbolic link to the Definitive Media Library stored in the /var/lib/pulp/content directory. In addition, each repository in a Content View contains metadata about the content belonging to the Content View. This means a Content View using a minimal number of packages uses a small amount of storage. However, the storage size adds up when you use multiple Content Views and a large number of packages per view.

For example, a Content View using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 RPMs repository might contain over 7000 packages. In terms of disk space, this might only result in less than 100MB of symbolic links. However, take into account the following:

To help reduce the amount of storage that Content Views consume, use the following recommendations:

Red Hat Satellite 6 also uses the following databases for its content management components:

In this chapter, we explored the base concept of content management in the context of Red Hat Satellite 6. This includes defining phases of the Red Hat Satellite 6 application life cycle and the different types of content that Red Hat Satellite 6 manages. This chapter also defined the scope of our example scenario and provided storage requirements to suit your content management needs.

The next chapter looks at creating organizations to store content.