Provisioning With Satellite; Requirements; Definitions And Terms - Red Hat NETWORK SATELLITE 5.3.0 Deployment Manual

Chapter 5.

Provisioning with Satellite

All organizations need simple, yet powerful tools to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. For
many years, Red Hat Network Satellite has empowered companies to build repeatable, predictable
and reliable deployment processes to ensure rapid repurposing of Linux servers and desktops.
Whether you have 10 systems or 10,000 systems, RHN Satellite can help you achieve this goal in a
disciplined fashion. Now, after significant investment, RHN Satellite 5.3 has dramatically boosted the
flexibility and power of its signature provisioning capabilities.
This document contains concise details and instructions for use of the kickstart provisioning
functionality in Red Hat Network Satellite.

5.1. Requirements

To use the new provisioning functionality, you need one or more target machines — either physical,
bare metal computer system(s) or virtual machine host(s). If you want to use Satellite's virtual machine
provisioning functionality, your virtual machine host(s) should be configured with either the Xen or
KVM virtualization technologies. Note that RHEL 5.4 and newer support KVM virtualization at this time.

5.2. Definitions and Terms

• Provisioning — The process of configuring a machine (physical or virtual) to a predefined known
state. Satellite ultimately accomplishes provisioning in all cases through the mechanism of
kickstarting.
• Kickstarting — A process of installing a Red Hat based system in an automated manner requiring
little or no user intervention. Technically, kickstart refers to a mechanism in the Anaconda installation
program that allows you supply a concise description of the contents and configuration of a machine
to the installer, which it then acts on. Such a concise system definition is referred to in Satellite 5.3.0
as a Kickstart Profile.
• Kickstart Profile – The kickstart file is a text file that specifies all of the options needed to kickstart a
machine, including partitioning information, network configuration, and packages to install. In RHN
Satellite, a Kickstart Profile is a superset of a traditional Anaconda kickstart definition, as Satellite's
implementation builds on Cobbler's enhancements to kickstarting. A Kickstart Profile presumes the
existence of a Kickstart Tree.
• Kickstart Tree – The software and support files needed in order to kickstart a machine. This is
also often called an "install tree". This is usually the directory structure and files pulled from the
installation media that ships with a particular release. In Cobbler terminology, a Kickstart Tree is part
of a Distro - short for distribution.
• PXE or Preboot eXecution Environment — A low-level protocol that makes it possible to kickstart
bare-metal machines (usually physical, or real, machines) on power-up with no pre-configuration of
the target machine itself. PXE relies on a DHCP server to inform clients about bootstrap servers (for
purposes of this document, Satellite 5.3.0 installations). PXE must be supported in the firmware of
the target machine in order to be used. It is possible to use the virtualization and reinstall facilities of
Satellite without PXE, though PXE is very useful for booting new physical machines, or reinstalling
machines that are not registered to Satellite.
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