Red Hat Network Satellite 5.1 Now Available

After hard work by our engineers to incorporate feature requests from users, we’re ready to unwrap the latest version of Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite with today’s availability of RHN Satellite 5.1. With Satellite, customers are granted comprehensive life cycle management with tools to manage systems, provision new systems, manage updates, monitor performance and more. RHN Satellite 5.1 includes some of the newest features that were born directly from issue tracker tickets submitted by customers, with added feedback from the dedicated RHN Satellite community. Thanks to all, today we’re able to provide the next version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Management platform. Here are some of the highlights in RHN Satellite 5.1:

Multiple Organization Support (Multi-Org)
While RHN Satellite 5.0 had a large focus on virtualization, 5.1 has Multi-Org. What’s Multi-Org? It allows you to create autonomous control domains within a single Satellite. With the current version of Satellite, all the entitlements, systems, etc. are owned by one organization.

With Multi-Org, one is able to create different domains within an enterprise. For example, in a bank, the Linux deployments of the investment bank business unit are completely separate from those of the car loan business unit, and the credit card business. An overall administrator assigns entitlements to the different organizations. If the investment bank tries to deploy too many systems based on their entitlements, they will not impact the car loan business unit, who planned ahead and enrolled the proper amount of entitlements.

Most of the time organizations like having their systems managed by their own teams, instead of yielding control to another group. This feature will help these organizations have more control over their systems. In this version the segregation between the groups is absolute, in the next version there will be sharing of common channels.

API Calls
With each release, we dedicate time to improve on our API facility. As good as the GUI is, there are some tasks that are just better suited for being done programmattically via the API. Our feedback from customers in the limited beta program was very positive. If you actively use this, and after reviewing our recent additions you don’t find your favorite non-implemented API call, please bring it to our attention via an issue tracker. The main focus on this release surrounds configuration management and activation keys.

Web Interface Enhancements
We’ve strived to improve the web interface interface as well. Our team is always listening to customers, and looking for ways to improve it. You’ll note improvements in key areas such as: CSV file export on select screens, a new search feature and improvements in sorting and filtering data with the web interface. As with the API calls, time is allocated in each release to address UI concerns, so give us your feedback.

64-bit Satellite
Customers have asked for a 64-bit version of Satellite. We listened! We understand that among other reasons, most customers are standardizing their hardware purchases, to 64-bit platforms. The 64-bit version is feature identical to 32-bit.

Satellite on zSeries (S390)
You knew Red Hat Enterprise Linux was supported on Mainframes, right? Well, now RHN Satellite is supported too. There are numerous advantages to this, aside from utilizing hardware you already own. Satellite on zSeries is very scalable in that if Satellite is running out of resources in its partition, you can speed it up by allocating more CPUs. For instances running on the zSeries network, traffic travels at near memory speed.

So, there you have the key features available today in RHN Satellite 5.1. Rounding out the release are Solaris enhancements and a new exporter tool to assist in exporting data to other satellites.

The beautiful thing about Red Hat’s subscription model is that customers currently subscribed to Red Hat Network Satellite will automatically receive the latest RHN Satellite 5.1 updates in their subscription. For those without an RHN subscription, look into it here.