In this video, we will review the basics of subscription management in Satellite. Most enterprises know that they have to keep track of all their software and hardware assets. Satellite collects a large number of facts about systems such as server hardware information, the date brought online, giving users one place to look for inventory and utilization information. In the demo, we will show how to create a manifest from your subscriptions on the Customer Portal then import that subscription into Satellite.

For the purposes of this video, I have got a couple of different environments that I am going to be using. I will point it out as they switch between them. But we are going to start in the Customer Portal. This should look very similar to what you have in your environment. I am currently logged on to access.redhat.com as my Satellite account. If I scroll down the page, I'm going to start in My Subscriptions and I can see here the subscription information that I have available. What I have may look very different from what you have.

I will click on Subscriptions, so you can see that I have a number of different kinds of software as well as my Quantity, my Entitlement Usage, and my renewal date. To create to take these subscriptions and get them into Satellite, I need to create a manifest. I will do that by creating a subscription allocation. I have a few that are already available. But I am going to create a New Subscription Allocation. I will call it RH053. And I will select the version of Satellite that I am using. And click Create.

For this subscription allocation, I will click on the Subscriptions button and Add Subscriptions. This will show me my subscription name as well as the start date, the end date and how many entitlements I have available. I am going to add quantity 10 of my Linux Server Standard physical or virtual nodes, as well as quantity 10 of Linux Server Premium physical or virtual, as well as 2 Satellites and 2 Capsules and 10 of Smart Management. Click Submit.

Now my RH053 subscription allocation, now has some associated subscriptions, I can export that manifest. That's downloaded a ZIP file here to my localhost. And I need to take that into my Satellite environment. My first Satellite environment that I have, this is a really early build. It has no host in it. It has no subscription information. So, I will go to Content > Subscriptions, and I am going to click the Manage Manifest button. No manifest has been uploaded so I will choose the RH053 file, click Open, and that will start the process of importing that manifest into Satellite. 

Now that my manifest has been imported, I can see the same subscriptions inside of my Satellite environment. So, as I begin adding hosts to this environment, the consumption number will change as hosts consume subscriptions. So, you can keep an eye on how many hosts are consuming your subscriptions compared to how many entitlements you have. 

Let’s say we add another piece of software, you can click the Add Subscriptions button. This is going to reach back out to the portal rather than going to the steps and recreating that manifest, we can simply add another software product to the existing manifest. So, if I wanted to add Red Hat Virtualization and 5 licenses, select it, enter quantity of entitlements, and hit Submit. Now my list of subscriptions contains the new Red Hat Virtualization entitlement that I just added.

Let’s take a look at the other environment that we used in the previous video. If you recall, in the previous video we added a custom product EPEL, into Satellite. If I go to Content and then Subscriptions, so if you are recall, in that video we added the EPEL product. Notice that it also added a subscription for EPEL with unlimited entitlements. So, as we leverage EPEL in our hosts it will start to consume those entitlements.

I will go to Hosts then Content Hosts, and I am going to select the host that I want to apply that EPEL subscription to. In this case all 5 of these hosts. Then under Select Action, I can click Manage Subscriptions, then I will select the EPEL row, and click Add selected. So, this will bulk add the subscriptions to these hosts without having to individually go and add subscriptions. This is a way that subscription management can be leveraged even for a non-Red Hat software.

Returning to Content > Subscriptions, we should now see that the EPEL product is consuming 5 out of unlimited entitlements. So even if it is not Red Hat software, subscription management in Satellite can help you manage consumption of other products. 

In this video we took a quick look at subscription management, we went out to the Customer Portal, created a brand-new subscription, and exported that as a manifest. We then imported that manifest into Satellite, which has our list of subscriptions that we can consume with our content hosts. We also looked at how a custom product can count entitlement usage as well.

That completes this video. See you in the next one.