(upbeat music)
- Hello, everyone.
I'm going to talk about what's new in Satellite 6.11.
Satellite 6.11 became generally available in June of 2022.
6.11 builds on top of the back-end work
implemented in Satellite 6.10,
taking advantage of the technical updates
to improve the experience of managing
Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts.
There are three themes to this release.
The first is user interface updates.
We're continually investing time and effort
into making Satellite easier to use.
In this version, we've made a big push
to update Satellite 6.11 to match the look and feel
of other products in the Red Hat portfolio,
which we think will optimize the user experience.
This version of Satellite is the first to include
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 support.
And finally, we have simplified
the operation of management tasks in Satellite.
Various features in Satellite
have had the number of operational steps reduced
or automated to improve the overall user experience
to reduce the overhead of managing
a Red Hat Enterprise Linux landscape.
As mentioned, Satellite 6.11 will support
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 hosts.
There's nothing to be done.
Just synchronize RHEL 9 content
and register RHEL 9 hosts with your Satellite 6.11 server.
We're continuously looking for ways
to simplify the operation of Satellite and in 6.11,
there are significant improvements.
Content publication workflow requires fewer menu changes.
Ansible workflows have been streamlined.
As well, we've enhanced
the Remote Execution user experience.
We've included a new cloud connector,
or method of configuring the Satellite server,
to communicate with console.RedHat.com
to provide information about hosts for analysis
by Red Hat Insights.
Here's the new Content View publication workflow.
As you can see, we've improved the information available
in the Content View menu.
And now, Content View promotion
is bundled into the publishing workflow.
The intention of these changes is to make content available
with less confusion.
There's a new menu for displaying host information.
This feature is in tech preview
and must be enabled manually.
Here's the new view for finding packages
installed on a particular host.
Here's the repository sets view.
This helps you easily determine
which repos are available to a host.
We've added some help
to get your Satellite server operating system
upgraded from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8.
Satellite 6.11 will support both RHEL 7 and RHEL 8.
This will give users greater flexibility
in upgrading from the RHEL 7 operating system to RHEL 8.
We'll have three upgrade paths.
First, there is the new deployment path.
Then there is also the backup restore path,
also known as cloning.
And the final and preferred method is with LEAPP,
which is an in-place upgrade operation.
So, as mentioned, there are three host upgrade paths.
The new deployment path is suitable
for customers that have already captured
their Satellite configurations in code,
such as in Ansible Playbook.
In the backup restore path,
this is similar to the new deployment path
but includes the extra step of backing up
and restoring content to the new Satellite server.
This process can take a long time
if your Satellite server stores a lot of content.
The LEAPP approach is the recommended in-place method
for upgrading Satellite.
Now, I'll discuss Satellite synchronization
with ISS network sync.
A little background to define the terms or words
being used here.
Inter-Satellite-Sync is about enabling
content synchronization between Satellite servers.
There are a couple reasons for it.
Security concerns are probably the most prominent.
Many organizations do not like having
infrastructure connected directly to the internet.
ISS network sync facilitates a network topology,
where content is synchronized to a primary Satellite server
before the secondary Satellite servers synchronize from it.
The connections between all servers are over HTTPS,
so you're guaranteed the security of TLS encryption.
The function of ISS network sync is pretty simple.
You just configure your subordinate Satellite servers
to use another Satellite
as a content delivery network provider.
Here's a diagram of how this works.
Data is synchronized directly
to the primary Satellite server,
which stores the content that you need.
The secondary Satellite servers,
in VLAN A and B in this diagram,
then synchronize their content
with the primary Satellite server.
Some of you may already know
that ISS was available in previous versions of Satellite,
and you are correct.
However, ISS network sync is different in function
because it still requires network connectivity.
We're now referring to the other ISS sync
as ISS export sync
because content is exported to the file system
before it is transferred to a secondary Satellite server.
Network sync and export sync use cases are different.
We expect that export sync would be used for situations
where content must be physically transferred
to a Satellite server
because the network is just not fast enough,
or reliable enough,
or a physical air gap is required.
Network sync and export sync
are both available in Satellite 6.11.
We've simplified Convert2rhel on Satellite.
Satellite 6.10 introduced the ability
to bulk convert sent OS hosts and Oracle hosts to RHEL.
In the next Satellite, that is Satellite 6.11,
we're building on top of that functionality
by automating and simplifying the process
to configure Satellite to perform these tasks.
First, there is a new Ansible Role for the Satellite server,
which will perform preparation tasks on the server.
Second, there's now an Ansible Playbook for the hosts
that will prepare the hosts and perform the conversion.
These two new features will reduce the overhead
of performing bulk Convert2rhel operations.
There are way more steps with Satellite 6.10.
Here's a rough outline of how it works in 6.11.
First, you set the role variables.
These include things like adding a new manifest
to add subscriptions.
Second, you assign the role to the Satellite server
and run it.
This adds the required content,
like the Convert2rhel repository.
Third, you register the desired hosts,
if you have not already done so.
And finally, you run the Convert2rhel Playbook
against the hosts.
We'd like to clarify our integration with Puppets.
We are not removing Puppet functionality from Satellite.
In Satellite, Puppet functionality will be provided
as a plugin,
ensuring that upgrades from 6.10 where Puppet is used,
will inherit Puppet functionality.
New installations will require that Puppet functionality
be enabled as an extra configuration step.
Thank you.
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