Chapter 1. Introduction

Red Hat Network is the environment for system-level support and management of Red Hat systems and networks of systems. Red Hat Network brings together tools, services, and information repositories needed to maximize the reliability, security, and performance of their systems. System administrators use Red Hat Network to register software and hardware profiles for their client systems. These hardware and software profiles are called system profiles. When a client system requests package updates, Red Hat Network returns only the applicable packages for the client based upon the profile stored on the Red Hat Network Servers.

Red Hat Satellite provides organizations with the benefits of Red Hat Network without the need for public Internet access for servers or client systems. In addition, users of Red Hat Satellite can: This gives Red Hat customers the greatest flexibility and power to keep servers secure and up-to-date.

Three types of Red Hat Satellite are available:

This guide describes the installation of all types of Red Hat Satellite.

Although the types of Red Hat Satellite are functionally similar, some differences do exist. These variations are primarily limited to hardware requirements, installation steps, maintenance activities, and some troubleshooting steps. This guide identifies distinctions between the Red Hat Satellite types by marking the differing instructions as either Embedded Database, Managed Database, or External Database.

In addition, Red Hat Satellite provides features to integrate an Enhanced Entitlement Reporting system with Subscription Asset Manager 1.3 and later. This guide also specifies requirements to integrate with an Enhanced Entitlement Reporting system.