Chapter 3. Managing Subscriptions

You can have more than one manifest in a Satellite Server if you want to manage more than one organization. Satellite 6 requires a single manifest for each organization configured on the Satellite. The advantage of this is that since each organization maintains completely separate subscriptions, you can support multiple organizations each with their own Red Hat Network accounts.

The Red Hat Customer Portal provides access to your subscription information. The Customer Portal can also add Satellite Servers as subscription management applications. This is necessary so that the Customer Portal can assign subscriptions to the Satellite.

For this scenario, we aim to add our Satellite Server as a content distributor in the Customer Portal. Follow these steps:

The Customer Portal now has an entry for our Satellite Server. Now we can assign subscriptions on this page and create our Subscription Manifest.

The Customer Portal page for the Satellite Server provides the ability to collect a group of subscriptions and attach them to the server for distribution to managed systems. As mentioned, we create a Subscription Manifest for our Satellite Server. To attach subscriptions and create the manifest for ACME, follow these steps:

Now we have a Subscription Manifest, which we upload into our Satellite Server.

Both the Red Hat Satellite 6 Web UI and CLI provide methods for importing the manifest.

scp ~/<manifest_file>.zip root@satellite.example.com:~/.

[user@client ~]$ scp ~/<manifest_file>.zip root@satellite.example.com:~/.

Then import it using the following command:

hammer subscription upload \
--file ~/<manifest_file>.zip \
--organization "ACME"

[root@satellite ~]# hammer subscription upload \
--file ~/<manifest_file>.zip \
--organization "ACME"

After a few minutes, the CLI reports a successful manifest import.

You can add and remove subscription to a manifest in the customer portal and then add the updated manifest to your Satellite in one of three ways:

hammer subscription upload --file ~/<manifest_file>.zip

# hammer subscription upload --file ~/<manifest_file>.zip

This chapter showed how to use a Subscription Manifest to take subscription information from the Red Hat Customer Portal and import it into our Satellite Server.

The next chapter looks at how to start importing content, specifically Red Hat’s RPM repositories.