Chapter 3. How does simple content access change subscription tools and workflows?
Simple content access is designed to improve the overall customer subscription experience by eliminating cumbersome and confusing parts of the subscription management workflow. When you enable simple content access, 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.
Because the behavior of the existing subscription tools is so fundamentally altered, subscription management with simple content access is a completely different operating model, with workflows that are incompatible with the traditional subscription management workflows.
For Satellite, simple content access is enabled at the allocation level, so that setting corresponds to the matching Satellite organization. It is possible to have a mixed environment for your Red Hat account, where simple content access is enabled for some Satellite organizations and not enabled for others. For an account with a mixed environment, behaviors and workflows are changed only for those Satellite organizations where simple content access is enabled.
Compare the differences in tools and workflows before and after simple content access is enabled:
Tracking subscription usage and reporting utilization
- simple content access is disabled
- The classic subscription model is used, where access to content is controlled by the attachment of subscriptions to individual systems.
- simple content access is enabled
- The new subscription model is used, where you can register a system and then enable any additional repositories that are needed to access content for which you have a subscription.
Using customized workflows that check the status of entitlements or subscriptions
- simple content access is disabled
- Your organization might have custom post-provisioning workflows with steps that check for the status of an entitlement or a subscription before completing certain actions.
- simple content access is enabled
- With entitlement and subscription status removed from the data reported by the subscription management tools, those workflows will no longer be valid and must be disabled or redesigned.
Checking subscription status
- simple content access is disabled
-
System-level subscription status (through
subscription-manager) is used to check whether an individual system (or host) has a valid subscription for specific content. If status shows asInvalidorInsufficient, additional subscriptions could be attached to resolve this problem. - simple content access is enabled
Subscriptions are no longer required to be attached to individual systems. If you run the
subscription-manager statuscommand, the overall status displays asDisabled(orUnknownfor Satellite 6.7 and earlier).NoteYou can still use the
subscription-manager identitycommand to check whether a system is properly registered.
Generating manifests
- simple content access is disabled
- Satellite manifests must contain enough subscriptions for every system registered to that Satellite Server or Capsule Server.
- simple content access is enabled
Satellite manifests must contain enough subscriptions to provide access to the software repositories that the systems will use. One of each subscription is sufficient.
NoteBeginning with Satellite Server 6.9, all newly created manifests use simple content access by default, regardless of the version of Satellite Server.
Using activation keys
- simple content access is disabled
Activation keys supply a number of attributes that are used to register systems, including the following examples:
- subscriptions to attach
- repositories to enable
- environment and content view that is used to configure the system
- host collection to join
This complex process can require up to three keys to configure a system, for example, a key to grant a virtual subscription, a key to configure content, and a key to configure custom or layered subscriptions.
- simple content access is enabled
- Activation keys are still used to register systems, but the subscription-related purposes of the keys are now obsolete. This change simplifies the use case for activation keys. In most cases, only one key per system (or host) is sufficient to configure content-related attributes, such as repositories and content views. In addition, the software repositories that can be enabled or disabled are more clearly exposed.
Using auto-attach
- simple content access is disabled
The auto-attach function is used to attach subscriptions to a system at the time of system registration or subscription expiration. Tasks that use auto-attach include the following examples:
-
Running
subscription-manager attach --auto -
Running
hammer host subscription auto-attach - Setting the Activation Key Type to Auto-Attach
-
Running
- simple content access is enabled
- Subscriptions are no longer required to be attached to individual systems, so tasks related to the auto-attach function are obsolete. If you run a command or perform an action related to auto-attach, either no action will happen or an error message is shown.
Using virt-who
- simple content access is disabled
- You must use the virt-who tool to consume the content provided by subscriptions that support multiple guests, such as RHEL vDC subscriptions. To ensure reliable access to content, you must run the virt-who tool every 1 to 4 hours to gather and refresh host-guest mappings from hypervisors and report that data to subscription management tools.
- simple content access is enabled
- Because subscriptions are no longer required to be attached to individual systems, virt-who is not required for content access. However, the reporting function of virt-who is still critically important to support the subscriptions service. The host-guest mappings gathered by virt-who are used to create the subscriptions service data, including usage data in the graphs and system-specific data in the tables. However, you can reduce how frequently virt-who runs to a maximum of twice per day.
Using system purpose (subscription attributes)
- simple content access is disabled
When system purpose values are set, the subscription tools, especially auto-attach, can more effectively attach a system to the best subscription. When auto-attach matches the requested attributes to a valid subscription, system purpose status updates from
MISMATCHEDtoMATCHED.The attributes included in system purpose settings, including role, SLA (service level agreement), and usage values, provide data about how a system is being used and supported.
- simple content access is enabled
-
Because subscriptions are no longer required to be attached to individual systems, and the auto-attach functions are obsolete, system purpose status is set to
DISABLED. However, the technical, business, and operational use cases supplied by system purpose attributes are important to the subscriptions service. In the subscriptions service, system purpose attributes are used to identify and filter system data. Without these attributes, the subscriptions service data is less accurate.
Using the subscription-manager command line tool
- simple content access is disabled
-
The
subscription-managercommand line tool functions as expected with the traditional entitlement-based subscription model. - simple content access is enabled
The behavior of the
subscription-managercommand line tool is changed. For version 1.27.9-1 and earlier, the tool might display misleading or false messages. For example, when you runyumcommands, you might receive output that is similar to the following example:This system is registered with an entitlement server but is not receiving updates. You can use subscription-manager to assign subscriptions.
For
subscription-managerversion 1.27.9-1 and earlier, you can ignore this message. For versions later than 1.27.9-1, this message is suppressed and does not appear. For more information about this known problem, see Bugzilla issue BZ1815624.
Using the Satellite and Red Hat Subscription Management interfaces
- simple content access is disabled
- The Satellite and Red Hat Subscription Management interfaces function as expected with the traditional entitlement-based subscription model.
- simple content access is enabled
- The Satellite and Red Hat Subscription Management interfaces contain messaging, including banners on pages with affected tasks, as reminders that simple content access is enabled and that subscriptions no longer need to be attached to systems.
