Chapter 5. Tools for administration of Red Hat Satellite

You can manage and monitor your Satellite infrastructure from a browser with the Satellite web UI. Satellite supports recent versions of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers.

The Satellite web UI and command-line interface support English, French, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese.

You can configure and manage your Satellite Server with CLI commands by using Hammer.

Using Hammer has the following benefits:

To issue Hammer commands, a user must have access to your Satellite Server.

In the background, each Hammer command first establishes a binding to the API, then sends a request. This can have performance implications when executing a large number of Hammer commands in sequence. In contrast, scripts that use API commands communicate directly with the Satellite API and they establish the binding only once.

You can write custom scripts and external applications that access the Satellite API over HTTP with the Representational State Transfer (REST) API provided by Satellite Server.

Using the REST API has the following benefits:

Scripts based on API commands communicate directly with the Satellite API, which makes them faster than scripts based on Hammer commands or Ansible Playbooks relying on modules within redhat.satellite.

With remote execution, you can run jobs on hosts from Capsules by using shell scripts or Ansible roles and playbooks.

Use remote execution for the following benefits in Satellite:

Communication for remote execution occurs through Capsule Server, which means that Satellite Server does not require direct access to the target host, and can scale to manage many hosts.

To use remote execution, you must define a job template. A job template is a command that you want to apply to remote hosts. You can execute a job template multiple times.

Satellite uses ERB syntax job templates. For more information, see Template writing reference in Managing hosts.

By default, Satellite includes several job templates for shell scripts and Ansible.

Satellite Ansible Collection is a set of Ansible modules that interact with the Satellite API. You can use these modules to automate many aspects of Satellite administration.

You can automate the installation process of a Satellite Server or Capsule Server by creating a Kickstart file that contains all the information that is required for the installation.

When you run a Red Hat Satellite Kickstart script, the script performs the following actions: