When you begin deploying subscriptions, it is important for the different personas in your organization to understand how and where those subscriptions are being used.

Operations personas, including IT administrators and system administrators, need to build and manage systems to run specific workloads. Procurement personas need to manage purchases by balancing the account’s subscription footprint with current and future business needs.

The setting of use case data on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system to record its intended use is done through a set of attributes that are collectively known as system purpose.

Note

System purpose attributes might be known by a different name in other Red Hat products. Collectively, they can also be known as subscription attributes.

System purpose attributes include the following types of information:

• Technical use case information, such as workload information
• Business use case information, such as the IT environment, which determines the scope of support needed for that environment
• Operational use case information, such as the service level

The following default values are available for each RHEL system purpose attribute:

• Role (technical use case)
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Compute Node
• Usage (business use case)
  • Production
  • Development/Test
  • Disaster Recovery
• Service Level Agreement (operational use case)
  • Premium
  • Standard
  • Self-Support

These system purpose attribute values help operators guide workloads to the correct systems and help procurement personnel filter and analyze system usage in tools such as Subscription Services to make more informed purchasing decisions.

You can set system purpose values during multiple phases of the system life cycle, enabling your organization to set these values at the most appropriate point in your process. You can set system purpose values at build time, when you are creating installable images for your subscription content, at connection time, during installation and registration tasks, or at runtime, when you begin using the content. For example:

• During activation key creation
• During image creation by configuring an image builder image with an embedded activation key that has includes system purpose values
• During a GUI installation when using the Connect to Red Hat options to register your system
• During a Kickstart installation when using the syspurpose Kickstart command
• After installation using the subscription-manager command-line interface tool