Adding CentOS Server to Satellite 6

Adding CentOS to Satellite 6

Satellite is a great product offered by Red Hat.  You can use it to provision, manage, and patch servers in your environment.  For the most part, you would think you would add RHEL servers to Satellite, as that is its primary purpose.

You can, however, add your CentOS servers to the system so that they can be monitored for needed errata, and patched.  You’ll need to set up your CentOS channels to download the proper repositories and such to help manage the CentOS systems.  I have setup CentOS activation keys, content views, and host groups all which are based on CentOS only.

Creating the CentOS Product

First we add our new Product by going to Content -> Products. The easiest method is to do the Repo Discovery.

For the repository type we want to pick yum repositories. In the URL you can put where the repositories are located. This works for any product, such as EPEL. Once the URL is entered, press discover. It will show you all the options under Discovered Repository. We want the /x86_64 repo, so we select it, and click on Create Selected.

Next, we choose New Product, name our Repository, as well as enter a good name for Repository Name and Respoitory Label at the bottom. You can leave the GPG Key blank if you wish, or download the GPG key from the repository and add it beforehand to Satellite in the GPG key section.

Finally, we need to sync our new repository as with any Satellite product. Go into Content -> Sync Status. Expand the new product you just added, and click on Synchronize Now. This may take some time depending on the size of the respository.

Once this is done, then you can add your CentOS product to content views that are attached to your CentOS hosts. Activation Keys also help in enabling the CentOS repository automatically for any CentOS server you register with Satellite.

Setting up CentOS servers to register with Satellite.

This example shows the portion of the process where we add the CentOS server to the Satellite environment.

Login to the CentOS server you wish to add as root and run the following commands.

# yum install subscription-manager 
# yum install http://satellitevm.example.com/pub/katello-ca-consumer-latest.noarch.rpm
# subscription-manager register --org="THEROOTUSER" --activationkey="AK-CENTOS7_Base_x86_64_Reg_to_Dev" --name 'CENTOS_SERVER01.example.com'
# yum localinstall http://fedorapeople.org/groups/katello/releases/yum/2.2/katello/RHEL/7Server/x86_64/katello-repos-latest.rpm
# yum install katello-agent

Once the commands have all been run you will see a green status on your CentOS server, and it will be ready to patch with a yum update.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in the comments section below.