Red Hat Satellite 5: Core Standard Operating Environments (SOE) Recommended Practices

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Red Hat Satellite 5 is a cornerstone of many customer Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) deployments. Satellite is used to help define and manage the life cycle of how RHEL is deployed within their environment. This document is aimed to provide guidance surrounding building and maintaining Standard Operating Environments (SOE) using Red Hat Satellite 5. Additionally you can then manage the life cycle of these SOE builds using Satellite 5 tools and processes.

This document consists of two major divisions, and references a number of other documents.

1. An introduction and discussion of the process, and then
2. An example with enough detail to get you started both developing and managing your SOEs and introducing some automation.
3. There are references to additional documents on an assortment of advanced topics.

Standard Operating Environments (SOE) can span a number of use cases. For our purposes we are limiting our description to what we are calling the Core­SOE. The development of Core­SOE describes what many would call the development of Gold Images or Gold System Definitions. I.e., a small set of well tested and standardized operating system definitions plus a limited layer of supporting technologies. These Core­SOEs are then used as the standard “blessed” baseline platform for all the permutations of a company’s application deployments that will be layered on top.

This document intends to describe, in a generic way how one develops these Core­SOEs using Satellite v5 and how they are maintained throughout a defined life cycle. This description serves as a recommended practice for not only Core­SOE development, but also a practice that extends to generalized Red Hat Satellite usage, and at a very high level, generalized Systems Management recommended practice.

Authored by Grant Gainey, Justin Sherrill, Todd Warner

See attached PDF for details

For Satellite 6, please see Red Hat Satellite 6: Core Standard Operating Environments (SOE) Recommended Practices.