In this video, we will go through the basic concepts and primary use cases for Red Hat Satellite. Let’s start with the basic elevator pitch for Satellite, which is Red Hat Satellite is a scalable platform to manage patching, provisioning and subscription management of your Red Hat infrastructure. Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Management business unit, which has the benefit of strong integrations with other management technologies like Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Ansible. Satellite is part of the collective management technologies group so all of our product, engineering, QE, and support teams are well integrated and focused on collaboration.

Satellite enables you to manage more than just RHEL. It provides life cycle management across your Red Hat infrastructure. For example, Satellite can be used to deploy RHEV hypervisors and configure them. If you are only using Red Hat Enterprise Linux today, as you adopt more Red Hat infrastructure, you'll want to bring those same process lifecycle managements into newer platforms.

Based on many years of customer feedback, we have simplified the workflows based on the most common patterns of use to streamline the user experience within Satellite. Satellite is also built to scale using Satellite Capsule Servers which we will talk about more in just a few moments. 

Satellite leverages existing resources including many services such as Active Directory, LDAP, identity management, as well as services for provisioning and configuration in a variety of hypervisors like VMWare, RHEV, and OpenStack. And Satellite also simplifies configuration from initial provisioning until you eventually retire a host. Drift in system configuration provides the ability to detect, report, and remediate changes back to a defined state of managed systems. 

As mentioned, Satellite is a scalable platform to manage your patching, provisioning, and subscription management of your Red Hat infrastructure. On screen you see the Satellite coat of arms, which in the center captures the four primary use cases for Satellite. Patching and software management simplifies the process of managing hundreds, or even thousands of systems, enabling you to easily patch security vulnerabilities or deploy custom packages to your content hosts. Subscriptions can easily be managed and tracked across your enterprise using Satellite subscription management. 

Provisioning of servers can be simplified using profiles, and new hosts can be quickly discovered reducing the overall time that it takes to provision new systems. And centralized configuration management can be used to detect and remediate drift and enable a standard operating environment.

Satellite also has many additional capabilities such as integration with Red Hat Insights for predictive analytics, and security compliance through OpenSCAP. There are two primary components for Satellite that you need to be aware of when you are planning a deployment. The Satellite Server synchronizes the content form the Red Hat Customer Portal, and provides life cycle management, role-based access control, GUI, CLI, API access, and integrated subscription management.

The Satellite Capsule Server mirrors content from the Satellite Server, that helps you facilitate content federation across geographical locations. So, host systems can pull content from the local geolocated Capsule Server instead of from the Satellite Server.

Many things done by the Satellite Server can also be done with the Capsule. You can see the list of them on the right-hand side of your screen. The important thing to note is that the Capsules help your Satellite environment scale. So, as you continue to add Capsule Servers in geographical locations, your Satellite can handle more and more hosts without your services being impacted.

Let’s talk a little bit about a typical Satellite 6 deployment. In the center here, you have the Red Hat Satellite Server. This is probably in your primary data center. The Satellite Server is connected to several Capsules each located in different regions. This could be a remote data center or a branch office. The Satellite Server is seeded by several content sources which are then synchronized with the Capsule Servers. So, if you are using the Red Hat portal or some sort of third-party repo, you pull that down to your Satellite Server, and then your Satellite Server gives the content out to the Capsules.

Ideally, your hosts are connected to the Capsules, the Capsules are connected to the Satellite, and the Satellite is connected to your content sources. That’s how your content will flow. Users can access Satellite via the GUI, the CLI, or the API. Using role-based access control, users are able to access one or more organizations based on their RBAC setting which enables multi-tenant operations.

Satellite also connects to Red Hat Insights to enable you to see predictive analytics and prevent problems in your environment before they occur. Next, we will jump into a Satellite lab environment and I’ll show you a brief overview of what the interface looks like as well as how to see connected Capsules and hosts.

For this demo I am using Red Hat Satellite 6.4. I have logged into the environment and I start in the dashboard. You have a variety of organizations. I am using the EXAMPLE.COM organization, and potentially you have a variety of Locations.  This could be Raleigh, Singapore, Boston, whatever your local location is.

We just talked about some of the layouts, so I am going to show you the Capsules first of all, so if I go to Infrastructure and then Capsules, you will see that I currently have just one Capsule listed which is the Satellite itself. As I go to scale out this environment I would add additional Capsules in different locations to help scale my Satellite.

If I go to Hosts > All Hosts, we can see the hosts that are currently configured in this environment. Right now, I have five of them.

This is a cloud-based environment, so it is kind of a smaller scale but the concepts that you learn in these videos are true whether it is five hosts, 500 hosts, or 5000 hosts. That concludes this section. We will see you in the next video.