Introducing Red Hat Smart Management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

How do you want to manage your systems? That probably depends a lot on the type of environment you have -- whether your systems are primarily on-prem, or if they reside in the cloud. Or a mixture of both. Either way, Red Hat is looking to meet you where you're at and provide management tools to suit your needs with Red Hat Smart Management.

We introduced Red Hat Smart Management at Red Hat Summit earlier this year in Boston as a layered add on for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as well as including Red Hat Insights with RHEL subscriptions.

Some of you may have never heard of Smart Management before. Others of you may have heard the term “Smart Management,” but don’t know what it is. And some people who are really Red Hat experts might be thinking: “Hey, I already have that.”

Red Hat Smart Management is a new offering for Red Hat based on an existing concept.

Smart Management offers the ability to consume Red Hat management tools the way that can best suits you. Satellite offers flexibility and capabilities, and cloud management services offers simplicity on our new as-a-Service offering.

• If you need a more traditional, on-premises management solution, then you can manage your hosts with Satellite.

• If you need a hosted, cloud based management solution, then you can choose cloud management services for RHEL.

In some cases you need a mixture of the two. You may have a portion of your infrastructure that needs a traditional, on-premise based management solution. You may have another portion of your environment that is run by your development organization and needs to be managed using a simple to deploy, up to date offering that can keep up with the speed that part of your business operates. Smart Management can help you do both.

What's included in Red Hat Smart Management

Red Hat Smart Management includes Red Hat Satellite, a scalable platform to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of your Red Hat infrastructure, regardless of where it is running. If you are brand new to Satellite, see our Red Hat Satellite Technical Overview (requires registration for course). If you are already an experienced Satellite user, you can review the Satellite 6.5 announcement to learn more about the latest Satellite features.

Smart Management also includes cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which are new Software-as-a-Service offerings. This allows you to choose how you want to manage your Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure, either using Satellite as an on-premises product or using the new cloud management services for RHEL, based in the cloud.

The new cloud management services for RHEL are entirely cloud based so there is no infrastructure to install or maintain. Plus, Red Hat can iterate on the features and functionality and you are on the latest version without downtime or maintenance on your end. 

To connect hosts to cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, each host needs to have the Insights client installed. This is the same client that Red Hat Insights uses, so if you are already using Insights (and you really should be), then you have nothing extra to install and maintain. If you have not yet installed the Insights client, information about how to install and register can be found on the Insights getting started page.

The initial release of cloud management services for RHEL includes three services, but it is important for you to know that over time we plan to continue to enhance these new offerings and grow additional offerings.

The first services in cloud management services are at a high level:

• Vulnerability management to assess, monitor, report, and remediate CVEs. 

• Compliance management  to assess, monitor, report, and remediate security compliance policies.

• System Comparison to assess the differences between two or more systems and report on the differences.

We’ll deep dive into these services in later posts, one for each service - for now we’re focusing on Smart Management itself.

To recap - Red Hat Smart Management includes Red Hat Satellite and cloud management services for RHEL. This is also covered in video format: Introduction to Red Hat Smart Management.

Add in Red Hat Insights

In addition to using Red Hat Smart Management, RHEL customers now have Red Hat Insights to help scale their environment through intelligent management. Insights is now included with all RHEL subscriptions for supported RHEL versions, which includes RHEL 6.10 and above, including RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 versions. For more on Insights, see our post "Redefining RHEL: Introduction to Red Hat Insights."

For more information

In summary, Red Hat introduced Red Hat Smart Management in May during Red Hat Summit, and we're eager to get the word out. 

Existing Smart Management customers can get started by visiting cloud.redhat.com to get started with the new cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To learn more about Red Hat Satellite visit the Satellite product page.