Getting Started with Red Hat Satellite 6

At this point in my life, I have been working with Satellite 6 for a little over 5 years now since Satellite 6.0. So when I say that getting started with Satellite 6 is easy, I speak from daily usage and a job that revolves around me working on issues for why it wasn’t easy for someone else. But in all honesty, I must say that this product has matured much like a fine wine when it comes to installing it. Hopefully, this post will serve as a testament to the required steps it takes to get started with Satellite 6.

Much like installing any enterprise application or software, the groundwork must be laid on the RHEL OS itself. For some, this might involve some additional steps than what I typically do which is based on individual usage. But to get started it’s really simple and minimal to get a Satellite up and running. The steps I use to build out a long term lab Satellite to work with on a daily basis are as follows:

1. Grab the latest RHEL 7 Server DVD ISO from the Customer Portal and spin up a fresh install of RHEL 7 using minimal install package profile during the anaconda build. I don’t have several physical systems laying around so everything I do is virtual. I typically give the VM 8 cores, 20 GB of RAM, and 200 GB of disk. The minimal install only calls for 4 cores, but when I’m testing on my Satellite and I need to sync multiple things, I appreciate the added cores for the multitasking. During the build-out of the disk partitions, I separate /var/lib/mongodb and /var/opt/rh/rh-postgresql12 into their own partitions and leave the rest in the root (/) partition. This allows any disk full issues from other directories to have less impact on corrupting data in my 2 database partitions.
2. After building out the RHEL 7 OS, register the system to the Customer Portal and update the server with the latest packages and errata. More than likely this update will come with some kind of kernel update in which case this is the perfect time to reboot the system prior to installing the Satellite application.
3. Once rebooted, I will enable the firewall rules as mentioned in the documentation, set the IP as a static IP on both the Satellite server and DNS, and enable the required repositories as provided by the docs.
4. At this point, you are 2 commands away from having a working Satellite server. After installing the satellite package via yum, do not reboot the server. Installing the package satellite and all of its dependencies requires no reboot and doesn’t conclude the installation of the application. You have the packages for the software installed, now it’s time to run the application’s installer and let the install begin. When running the satellite-installer command I only ever run the following 3 options as stated in the documentation (excluded the password option) because anything outside of these 3 options can be changed with another run of the installer:
   satellite-installer -S satellite --foreman-initial-organization "initial_organization_name" --foreman-initial-location "initial_location_name" --foreman-initial-admin-username admin_user_name
5. Profit!

At this point, I have a successfully installed Satellite application that I can now log into from my web browser and begin to look around. Because I have not allocated any subscriptions to the Satellite, I’m unable to enable any repositories and sync them. I will talk more about this and subscription management in another post.