Creating Red Hat Customer Portal Activation Keys

Deprecation of Activation Keys in access.redhat.com

NOTE:
As part of the transition of subscription services to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, the interface to manage activation keys in access.redhat.com is deprecated and will be removed in the future.

Users are advised to use the This content is not included.Activation Keys interface at the Hybrid Cloud Console, documented in the product documentation

Activation keys in Red Hat Subscription Management assist you with registering systems and attaching subscriptions associated with your account. Organization Administrators can create an activation key to preconfigure subscriptions before systems are registered. Users can then use the activation key to register systems with all required subscriptions attached with a single command.

Note: The This content is not included.Activation Keys page in RHSM is only available to Organization Administrators.

Background

The typical process for registering a RHEL system is to:

1. Run subscription-manager register from the system's terminal.
2. Enter your Red Hat login and password (Customer Portal credentials)
3. Use subscription-manager to list available subscriptions and attach them to the system.
4. Enable repositories in those subscriptions.

Activation keys combine these system registration steps into one process. The user provides a key and org ID to subscription-manager, and then the system gets registered, the subscriptions get attached, and the repositories are enabled with just one command.

There are several reasons why you may want to do this:

• You don't have to enter your Red Hat login and password. This can be useful if you don't want others in your org to have administrative access to your subscriptions but you still want them to be able to register their system.
• It's convenient. Instead of having to run multiple commands to register a system, you can just use one command.
• You can easily bulk script the registration and subscription of multiple systems.

Activation keys are set up to define preferences for the subscriptions attached to them:

• Service level: Filters subscriptions that match the selected service level to the system
• Auto attach: When enabled, RHSM scans your inventory and attaches the system to a compatible subscription automatically

Create a New Activation Key (requires Organization Administrator access)

1. From the This content is not included.Activation Keys page, click New.
2. Select a Name, Service level, and Auto Attach settings.
3. Click Add Subscriptions.
4. Select the subscription(s) you want to attach to the key, and click Add Selected.
5. Click Create.

Note: The service level acts as a filter, not as a preference. You still need to confirm that you are registering your systems with the appropriate subscription service level.

Using an Activation Key to Register a System

See How to register a system using an activation key

Note: When using an activation key, you will need your organization ID which is displayed at the top of the Activation Keys page. Organization Administrators who distribute activation keys to non-admins will need to provide this ID separately with the key.