Getting Started with Simple Content Access

Simple content access is a set of capabilities that enables a change in the way Red Hat manages its subscription and entitlement enforcement model. This model of content access and consumption results in fewer barriers to content deployment.

With simple content access, the enforcement model changes from a per-system requirement, where you must attach a subscription to a system before you can access content, to a per-organization and per-account requirement, where you can access content on a system without attaching a subscription to that system.

Because of the added freedom and flexibility to consume content that simple content access provides, and in the absence of strict entitlement enforcement from the classic entitlement-based subscription model, it becomes important for you to keep track of how you are using your subscriptions. With the subscriptions service, Red Hat provides additional tooling to help you with tracking and compliance. The subscriptions service is a reporting solution that provides account-wide visibility of both subscription usage and utilization and aids in self-governance of your entire subscription profile.

When simple content access and the subscriptions service are used together, they enable a different and more flexible subscription experience. Overall, this experience removes or improves many of the high-overhead and complicated business processes that are associated with the classic Red Hat entitlement-based enforcement subscription model:

You can choose to use neither, either, or both of these services. However, simple content access and the subscriptions service are designed as complementary services and function best when they are used in tandem. To learn more about the subscriptions service and how you can use it with simple content access, see the Getting Started with the Subscriptions Service guide.

The foundational benefit of simple content access is that it offers a less restrictive and more flexible way to consume your Red Hat subscriptions. However, this flexibility does include some limitations.

Simple content access is designed to improve the overall customer subscription experience by eliminating cumbersome and confusing parts of the subscription management workflow. With simple content access enabled, that action changes not only the user workflows that manage your subscriptions and provide access to content, but it also changes the way that the various subscription tools themselves operate. These tools include Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Subscription Management, the subscription-manager command line tool, activation keys, virt-who, and others.

For the most recent information that describes the differences between the old entitlement-based workflow and the simple content access workflow, see the information about operational changes in the Simple Content Access Red Hat Customer Portal article.

To begin using simple content access, you must meet the following software requirements.

For simple content access with Red Hat Subscription Management:

For simple content access with Red Hat Satellite:

As you use simple content access, note the following agreements and contractual responsibilities that remain in effect:

Simple content access does not eliminate any contractual requirements between you and Red Hat. You are still required to ensure that your deployments are in accordance with any Red Hat contracts.

The process of migrating Red Hat accounts and organizations that primarily use Red Hat Subscription Management for subscription management to use simple content access begins on October 25, 2024 and will be complete in November 2024.

For Satellite, new allocations and manifests have used simple content access by default since the release of Satellite 6.9. New Satellite organizations have used simple content access by default since the release of Satellite 6.13, where the setting on the organization overrides any setting on the manifest.

For Red Hat accounts and organizations that primarily use Satellite, versions 6.15 and earlier can continue to support an entitlement-based workflow for the remainder of the supported lifecycle for those versions. However, Satellite version 6.16 and later versions support only the simple content access workflow.

For the most recent information about the interactions of simple content access and specific versions of Satellite, see the Transition of Red Hat’s subscription services to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console (console.redhat.com) Red Hat Customer Portal article.

# Get a list of all the currently enabled repos
REPOS=$(subscription-manager repos --list-enabled | grep "Repo ID" | cut -f 2 -d ':' )

# (Optional) dump that list to a file in case of errors
echo $REPOS >> ENABLED_REPOS.txt

# Construct a command line to pass to 'subscription-manager repos'
# so that we call it once, instead of once per repo. This would lower the
# number of API calls and load on the Satellite.
CMDLINE=$(echo $REPOS | sed 's/ / --enable /g')

# Disable all the repos & Remove any existing entitlements
subscription-manager repos --disable '*'
subscription-manager remove --all

# Call subscription-manager fresh to ensure that we have a content access cert
# (which is the authorization method when SCA is enabled)
subscription-manager refresh

# Finally (re) enable the correct repos.
subscription-manager repos --enable $CMDLINE