Red Hat Satellite 6.5 is now available

Red Hat is pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Satellite 6.5. The latest release focuses on support for hosts running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and support for FIPS on the Satellite host.

What is Red Hat Satellite?

Red Hat Satellite is a systems management solution that makes Red Hat infrastructure simple to deploy, scale, and manage across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Satellite enables users to control the full lifecycle of Red Hat systems and ensure that they are running efficiently, more securely, and compliant with various standards.

By automating most tasks related to maintaining systems, Satellite helps organizations increase efficiency, reduce operational costs, and enables IT to better respond to strategic business needs.

If you are new to Satellite please check out the Satellite product page or the free RH053 Satellite Technical Overview course.

What’s New in Red Hat Satellite 6.5?

Here are a few of the key benefits and features in Red Hat Satellite 6.5.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Provisioning & Patching

With Satellite 6.5, you'll have the same patching and provisioning features for the recently released RHEL 8 as you do for RHEL 7 and RHEL 6.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Application Streams

RHEL 8 introduced Application Streams (AppStreams), and with the 6.5 release Satellite is now able to provide content for AppStreams. Referred to as "Module Streams" in Satellite, AppStreams allows Red Hat to provide customers more application options with less complexity.

For example, you can choose PostgreSQL 10 or PostgreSQL 9.6 depending on your needs without having to configure additional repositories and worry about RPM dependency conflicts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 System Purpose

With Satellite 6.5 and RHEL 8, you can set the intended purpose of a system and automatically attach entitlements to the system.

The main engine for system purpose is now integrated into Satellite. Benefits include:

• In-depth system-level information for system administrators and business operations.

• Reduced overhead when determining why a system was procured and its intended purpose.

• Improved customer experience of Subscription Manager auto-attach as well as automated discovery and reconciliation of system usage.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles

Satellite 6.5 provides support for RHEL system roles. These are Ansible playbooks that can be run on hosts managed by Satellite. This includes roles for setting SELinux policy, setting the system time, and deploying the Red Hat Insights client.

Security Features in 6.5

Satellite 6.5 includes a few new features designed to help further secure your environment.

FIPS Support on RHEL 7

By installing Satellite Server and Satellite Capsule on a FIPS-enabled RHEL 7 host, Satellite inherits the FIPS level of the RHEL system it's hosted on. Note that this requires a fresh install of Satellite on the host, it is not possible to enable FIPS on a RHEL 7 system with Satellite already installed to provide FIPS support for Satellite. All Capsules connected to the Satellite Server must also have FIPS enabled.

OpenSCAP Visibility

Satellite 6.5 now offers the ability to show all hosts that fail specific OpenSCAP rules, making it easier for administrators to check systems for potential security or policy issues.

Satellite Admin Role

In some situations it may be desirable to separate the ability to administer the Red Hat Satellite infrastructure from the ability to administer Satellite-managed hosts. With 6.5, Satellite has a new Satellite Admin role that allows a user to manage Satellite infrastructure and create new organizations, but not manage the hosts themselves.

Content Management

Satellite 6.5 also brings new benefits around content management to the table.

Export content views

In Red Hat Satellite 6.5 you can export a content view from one Satellite environment and import that content view into another (typically disconnected or airgapped) Satellite environment.

For example, a customer may have a Satellite connected to the internet (Satellite1) and a second Satellite that is in an airgaped or disconnected section of their network (Satellite2).  They want the two environments to be as similar as possible, so they download all of the content and organize it into content views on Satellite1.

They could then export the content views from Satellite1, save the exported data onto an optical disc, USB drive, or other approved device, then import the content views into Satellite2.  The end result is the content and the content views on Satellite1 and Satellite2 are the same. This new feature is exposed by the Hammer CLI tool. Using Hammer you can export the RPMs, import the RPMs from another environment, and publish content views as well as create new content view versions.

Container admin

Satellite 6.5 includes enhancements to managing container images from Satellite, including a new authenticated registry, container repository discovery, the ability to create local image repositories from search results, and customized image naming.

Additional Details

That's just some of the new features and benefits you'll see in Red Hat Satellite 6.5. For more details on this release, see the Release Notes.

For instructions on performing a fresh installation of Red Hat Satellite 6.5, see  Installing Satellite Server from a Connected Network and Installing Satellite Server from a Disconnected Network.

For instructions on upgrading from an earlier version of Red Hat Satellite 6.x, see the Upgrading and Updating Red Hat Satellite Guide.