Chapter 28. Integrating with Satellite 6 During Provisioning

It is a relatively common requirement to register newly provisioned Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines directly with Satellite 6 as part of the provisioning process. This ensures that the resultant VM is patched and up to date, and is configured by Puppet according to a server role.

This chapter describes the steps involved in adapting the provisioning workflow so that Red Hat virtual machines are automatically registered with Satellite 6 as part of the provisioning operation. We’ll be preparing the Satellite environment slightly for the automation, and we’ll call the Satellite RESTful API to perform some of the integration steps. This is a relatively simple use case that demonstrates the capability of CloudForms to integrate with our wider enterprise.

Hosts and Content Hosts

Registering a new system with Satellite 6.1 currently requires two operations. We need to create a Satellite host entry, which registers the server as a configuration management client, manageable by Puppet. We also need to use subscription_manager to activate the server as a content host, which associates one or more Red Hat subscriptions with the server and makes software package repository content available.

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