Red Hat Consulting: Provisioning with Red Hat Satellite 6

Satellite is Red Hat’s content management, provisioning, configuration management, and lifecycle management solution to help keep your infrastructure running efficiently and more securely while reducing costs and overall complexity. Regardless of your what your environment looks like, you can benefit from the configuration management capabilities that Satellite provides. In this short video, we discuss machine provisioning, one of the most popular features of Satellite 6, and demonstrate the Satellite provisioning workflow:

1. Select a toolset for deploying the new machine:
   • Hammer command line interface (CLI)
   • Web graphical user interface (GUI)
   • Satellite 6 application programming interface (API)
2. Log in to Satellite and provide host configuration information:
   • Host name
   • Organization in which the host will reside
   • Location of the new host
   • Deployment platform. Satellite 6 can provision to any of the following environments: physical machines, virtualization infrastructure, or servers within the cloud space. In our example, we deploy a new instance out to Red Hat virtualization. We start by selecting the compute resource that is associated with Red Hat virtualization and view compute profiles that are associated with that resource.  Compute profiles are pre-set machine types that define CPU and memory starting points.
3. Define host content and configure the new host, specifying where content views originate and the location of existing configuration information, if applicable. Specifying a host group allows you to inherit common configuration information from a broader set of machines.
4. Satellite 6 includes Puppet, and allows Puppet modules to be loaded into your content views. You can select Puppet classes to apply and customize each machine that you deploy.
5. Define network properties:
   • Device to which the host will attach
   • Device name
   • Subnet
   • Domain name system (DNS) domain
6. Specify operating system information:
   • Operating system for the new host
   • Location of the installation media
   • Partition table type
   • Provisioning templates, which contain your kickstarts and any pre-configuration and post-configuration scripts for customization.
7. Select the Submit button to provision your new machine. The virtualization platform creates your new virtual machine and dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) determines the existence of a host reservation or defines an IP address. The host then boots up using a Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) boot process and communicates with the Satellite trivial file transfer protocol (TFTP) server to extract the initial image. Lastly, the host is then kickstarted with the initial configuration that you specified and the host addresses are validated within DNS.

In a nutshell, once you set up the back end components, you can configure new machines that are customized to your specific environment needs with the push of a button. Using this workflow, you can deploy additional virtual machines at any time, rapidly and consistently, saving you precious time and effort while providing a more reliable environment.

Want help including Satellite in your cloud lifecycle-management strategy?

This is not Red Hat’s first rodeo. Talk to your account executive about a Red Hat Discovery Session to find out more about integrating Satellite, or reach out directly to redhat.com/consulting with questions. Red Hat Consulting is here to help.

And be sure to catch another segment of the Red Hat Consulting Whiteboard Video series, available at: red.ht/RHCVideos.   

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