Possible Flex Guest Entitlement Issues When Upgrading to RHN Satellite 5.4

Solution Verified - Updated

Environment

Issue

  • unable to activate new RHN Satellite certificate with Flex Guest entitlements

  • virtualized guests consume regular entitlements instead of Flex Guest entitlements

Resolution

On January 17, 2011 Red Hat has released two key update errata to RHN Satellite that can help you to avoid Flex Guest issues during the upgrade: 

  1. This update contains updated RHN Satellite upgrade instructions and a script to check potential problems with a new RHN Satellite certificate as part of the upgrade procedure. The script now informs of potential activation problems and recommended courses of action.  The script will inform you if you need to contact Red Hat support to assist you with the upgrade.
  2. RHN Satellite does a better job of ensuring that systems are assigned the proper type of entitlement during the upgrade process.  This errata corrects several errors we found during the entitlement conversion process when upgrading from RHN Satellite 5.3 to 5.4.  For example: Virtual guests that consume free entitlements are now correctly converted to Flex Guests after removal of their virtual host system. RHN Satellite entitlement logic now allows a flex guest capable system to use Flex Guest entitlements for both base and child channels, whereas previously a registered system could only consume one flex entitlement for one channel at a time.

The net result of these changes is a better experience when upgrading from RHN Satellite 5.3 to 5.4.

More detailed information can be found at:
http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2011-0155.html
This content is not included.http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHBA-2011-0156.html%20(pay%20special%20attention%20and%20follow%20the%20steps%20in%20the%20Resolution%20section%20here)

You may also find the following solution helpful:
New RHN Satellite certificate activation fails with "You do not have enough unused virtualization_host/virtualization_host_platform entitlements"

If necessary, you can contact Red Hat Global Support Services via the contact info and case links found in our Customer Portal at https://access.redhat.com/support/.

Root Cause

RHN Satellite 5.3 and prior did not directly support Flex Guest entitlements. Instead, Flex Guests were mapped to physical entitlements in the RHN Satellite certificate.  For all practical purposes, this means that Flex Guest entitlements are indistinguishable from regular physical entitlements in RHN Satellite 5.3 and prior certificates.

RHN Satellite 5.4 now supports Flex Guest entitlements.  A problem can arise during the upgrade process, because in RHN Satellite 5.3, physical and Flex Guest entitlements were implemented as a single unified pool of physical entitlements, but now in RHN Satellite 5.4 there are two separate pools of entitlements (Flex Guest and physical).  It is possible in RHN Satellite 5.3 and prior for customers to accidentally assign entitlements to the wrong type of machine, for example assigning Flex Guest virtual entitlements to physical machines, because they were all in the same pool of entitlements.

Comments

Relevant Red Hat Bugzillas of note:

This content is not included.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=661109

This content is not included.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=668004

This content is not included.https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=664930

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