Red Hat Satellite 6.3.3 and beyond

Satellite

Red Hat Satellite 6.3.3 was released last week and you can find out all about it at the official blog post Satellite blog – Satellite 6.3.3 is now available.

The ‘foreman-maintain’ script for maintaining the upgrades is quite polished now and upgrades are more straightforward as a whole. The ‘foreman-maintain’ script handles the upgrading of the Satellite server in terms of:

  • Checking the Satellite services are running before you start
  • Asking if you want to remove old tasks
  • Checking there is sufficient space in the filesystems
  • Checking the disk speed to the pulp and mongodb disks
  • Ensuring the correct repositories are used for the upgrade
  • Pausing scheduled sync jobs before the upgrade and re-enabling them afterwards
  • Performing the upgrade itself

It’s great and I hope we see this enhanced in the future to cover Capsule upgrades.  By no means does that mean the Capsule upgrade is tricky.  Not at all, it basically consists of:

katello-service stop
yum update
satellite-installer --scenario capsule --upgrade

followed by a restart of the server or Satellite & goferd services.  The ‘foreman-maintain’ script could basically wrap this up in a tidy bow in the same way it does on the Satellite.

As always – perform a backup of Satellite before upgrading!

Satellite 6.4

Whilst browsing the Red Hat website, I found the following article which is worth highlighting if you manage a Red Hat Satellite 6 instance:

What you need to know to be ready for Satellite 6.4 and Puppet 5

A key piece to note is that the upcoming release of Red Hat Satellite – version 6.4 – will only support Puppet 5.  This change:

Affects ALL Satellite 6.3 users, even if you are not using Puppet or if you are using Puppet Enterprise

I recommend reading this document and planning according to your use case – maybe you use the Puppet that comes with Satellite or maybe you don’t – regardless you’ll still need to upgrade.

The upcoming release of Satellite 6.4 will only support Puppet 5

Here’s the Upgrading Puppet Section of the Red Hat Satellite 6.3 Upgrade Guide that will help you plan.  In the meantime, keep enjoying the Satellite 6.3 goodness!

Update 16 October 2018 – Satellite 6.4 is now available

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