Chapter 7. Enabling simple content access with Red Hat Satellite
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.
7.1. Enabling simple content access on an existing Satellite allocation and manifest
For Satellite version 6.16, manual activation of simple content access is no longer necessary.
For supported versions of Satellite 6.15 and earlier, see the following articles for the most recent information about simple content access enablement:
7.2. Completing post-enablement steps for Satellite
After you enable simple content access, the way that you interact with some subscription management tools, including Satellite, differs. You must make some changes in Satellite to accommodate these different workflows and the individual behaviors within them.
7.2.1. Configuring activation keys and refreshing manifests
When you change from the entitlement mode to the simple content access mode, workflows that rely on existing activation keys and manifests are affected.
- You must create new activation keys that contain only content-related functions and do not contain the subscription-related functions that relied on attaching subscriptions to individual systems through entitlements.
If you are using Satellite 6.13 or later, you must add the renewed subscriptions to a manifest and refresh it at the time of subscription renewal. If you are using Satellite 6.12 or earlier, after you enable simple content access on the manifest you must refresh it. Note that Satellite versions 6.13 and earlier are out of support.
NoteFor Satellite version support information, see the Red Hat Satellite Product Life Cycle life cycle and update policy document.
For more information about the effects that a change to simple content access has on existing activation keys and manifests, see the following articles:
7.2.2. Updating host groups
Use the following steps to update each relevant host group to use the new activation keys. You can also perform these steps from the hammer command line interface.
- From the Satellite web UI navigation, click Configure > Host Groups.
- Click the host group that you want to update. Then click the Activation Keys tab.
- On the Activation Keys page, enter the new activation key for the host group, replacing the old activation keys. Click Reload data to confirm the activation key change for the host group.
- Click Submit to save the host group changes.
7.2.3. Reconfiguring hosts
For Red Hat Satellite, the new activation keys that you create for simple content access apply only to newly provisioned hosts. For existing hosts, you must do some reconfiguration and re-enable repositories.
When simple content access is enabled, all repositories are disabled by default if a host does not have a subscription attached. This default setting prevents conflicting repositories from being enabled when a host has access to repositories that span multiple operating system versions.
To do these changes, you can use the following commands as a snippet in a remote job that runs with the remote execution function of Red Hat Satellite. Comments are included in the following snippet to help you understand the series of tasks. You can also run these commands locally on each host, but using the bulk host management and remote execution capabilities of Red Hat Satellite during a maintenance window is more efficient.
# 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
7.2.4. Completing additional post-enablement steps
After the migration for your Red Hat account and organization is complete and simple content access is enabled, review the articles in the Additional resources section for more information about using the simple content access mode and configuring and working with the services in the Hybrid Cloud Console.
- Ensure that you understand how this change to the simple content access mode affects the workflow that your organization uses. If you had any customized processes that relied upon artifacts from the old entitlement-based mode, such as checking for valid subscriptions on a per-system basis, these processes will need to be discarded or redesigned to be compatible with the new simple content access workflow.
Find out more about additional services in the Hybrid Cloud Console that can improve your subscription and system management processes and determine if you are taking advantage of them. See the Hybrid Cloud Console at https://console.redhat.com to explore these services.
- Authorize your Red Hat organization’s users to access the services of the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console by setting up user groups, assigning roles, and doing other tasks in the role-based user access control (RBAC) system.
- Authorize your Red Hat organization’s users to view system inventory data with appropriate filtering by creating workspaces that classify systems into logical groups.
- Configure Hybrid Cloud Console notifications so that alerts about specific events in Hybrid Cloud Console services can go to a named group of users or go to applications, APIs, or webhooks for additional custom actions.
- Activate the subscriptions service, if this service is not already active, to begin account-wide usage reporting of Red Hat products.
Explore the capabilities, including subscription and system management capabilities, of the Hybrid Cloud Console and how workflows for some of these capabilities might have changed from the workflows that were previously available in the Red Hat Customer Portal at access.redhat.com:
- Tracking usage reporting for Red Hat products and variants on the product platforms pages of the subscriptions service.
- Tracking and managing your system infrastructure in the inventory service.
- Using activation keys to help with system registration, setting system purpose, and enabling repositories.
- Creating and exporting manifests for use within your Red Hat Satellite environment to find, access, and download content from the Red Hat Content Delivery Network.
- Determining whether the additional capabilities of Red Hat Insights, including the advisor, vulnerability, remediation, patch, and other services are right for your environment.
Additional resources
The following articles are actively being updated to address customer questions and concerns during and after the account migration process that began on October 25, 2024.
