Red Hat Satellite 6.0 - Part 1 - Installation

Red Hat Satellite 6 was released last week and it has a lot of cool stuff that I want to get implemented in my environment. In this post I will attempt to document my installation of Sat 6.  I will make a new post for my migration from Sat 5 to 6.  I am following along the doc located at the official documentation.

I decided to live on the edge and try to deploy with RHEL 7 instead of 6. Much learning will have had! Also note, all commands in this guide are ran as root from a root shell.

Server specifications I'm using:
OS: RHEL 7
Hardware: VMWare 5.5
CPU: 4 cpu single socket
RAM: 8 GB
Disk: /boot 500 MB, / 30 GB, /var/lib/mongodb 50 GB, /var/lib/pulp 200 GB.

RHEL 7 Installation
For the installation, I didn't do anything special. Selected minimal install for packages and manually setup my partitions. The most important part is to make sure you have enough disk for the internal database and for all the repositories.  Some guy on the internet said that he had RHEL 6,7 and openstack repositories sync'd, his DB was 10 gig and his repositories were 65 gig.

In sat5, /var/satellite was where all the repositories were stored, in sat6, they are located in /var/lib/pulp. The satellite mongo database is in /var/lib/mongodb.  

Attach the server to a valid RHEL license using the subscription-manager command. Update all packages and reboot since there is probably a kernel update.  You will also need to attach to a Satellite license of some kind.

Satellite Installation
After installation and patching, I made sure all repositories accept the ones necessary are enabled.

• subscription-manager repos --disable "*"
• subscription-manager repos --enable rhel-7-server-rpms --enable rhel-server-rhscl-7-rpms --enable rhel-7-server-satellite-6.0-rpms

Install Satellite 

• yum install katello

If it comes back and says that katello is not found, then you either don't have the correct repositories selected or the wrong subscription attached to the system. 

Run the Satellite installer

• katello-installer

This process takes a while to run. Use this time to add a DNS A record for the server or even a CNAME if you want to get fancy if you have not already done so.  When the installer is complete, it will tell you what the admin password is for the satellite web page. If you forget what the password is, run this command and it will generate a new one.

• foreman-rake permissions:reset

Also, disable the firewall so you can actually get to the page. If you want to keep the firewall on, refer to the official doc on which ports to keep open.

• systemctl stop firewalld

We're now ready to log onto the Satellite management webpage.